





. or <^ , 






'iw 

^^^m 



ce<^ 









^^ 






cere ' 

re: 67c. ' 



c c c :C '^^ 

:ccr ^:^, 

:cr ((A 
c^ re <r 



recce i 

ca/C:C ■; 












J LlBiUUY OF CONGRESS, 



'iAnp. Es:.... I 



lojjrigM j^'o ^ 

^^«^ .S7-t. I 

■ ^ :» 

UNITED STATES OF AMERICA, i 









9 it 



"^"^ 



^m^' 









■ill 






t F 
?^i^^ 
























^^ 


















em ? a 



r -'CCi.. c<x_ 

.t<::r rex 









■--^'"^C 















_,cc C O 
: err c x:^ 



t(<C 






Gcotrc c 



ccTicxcarc 



^ccic 









^^ 



4, cc'ssac 






a?r<£<rc 



1^ cTj «ie<: 



^r ^ cxxi <z ecu 









-. ^r^^ c<s5C 






CC cccc 

=: c <; c:<rf< 
> C C CCc 



c c ft 









4£rcr c<^sz 



New-England Legends. 



BY 



HARRIET PRESCOTT SPOFFORD. 



WITH ILLUSTRATIONS. 





BOSTON : 
JAMES R. OSGOOD AND COMPANY, 

(Late Ticknor & Fields, and Fields, Osgood, & Co.) 
187I. 



Sl6 



Entered, according to Act of Congress, in the year 1871, 

By HARRIET PRESCOTT SPOFFORD, 

In the OfBce of the Librarian of Congress, at Washington. 



BAND, AVERY, & FRTE, PRINTERS, 3 C0R5HILL, BOSTON. 



The following hastily-prepared sketches, originally published in less permanent form, are 
collected at the request of indulgent readers, and offered with all due apology for their incom- 
pleteness. H. P. S. 

Newburyport, I^ass., Aug. i, 1871. 



CONTENTS. 



PAGE. 

The True Account of Captain Eidd ....... 1 

Chaklestown ........... 8 

Salem ............ 15 

Newbukyport ........... 24 

Dover 29 

Portsmouth ........... 36 



ILLUSTRATIONS. 



PAGE. 

KiDD KILLS William Moore ......... 3 

Escape of the Mtsteriods Lady from the Ursuline Convent on Mt. Benedict . 11 

Ruins of the Ursuline Convent . . . . . . . .13 

Rev. George Burroughs accused of Witchcraft . . ' . , .17 

Capt. Boardman orders the British Flag to be struck . . . .25 

Grand-daughter of RIajor Waldron alone in the Woods . . . .33 

Frances Deering making Signal . ' . . •. . . . .37 



THE TEUE ACCOUNT OF CAPTAIN KIDD, 



The islands about the harbors of all our New 
England rivers are so wild, and would seem to 
bave offered so many advantages, that they 
have always been supposed, by ttie ruder popu- 
lation, to be the hiding-place of piratical treas- 
ures, and particularly of Captain Kidd's ; and 
the secretion, among rocks and sands, of chests 
of jewels stripped from noble Spanish ladies 
who have walked the awful plank, with shot- 
bags full of diamonds, and ingots of pure gold, 
is one of the tenets of tlie vulgar faiti. This 
belief has ranged up and down the whole 
«hore with more freedom than the pirates ever 
did, and the legends on the subject are legion 
— from the old Frenchman of Passamaquoddy 
Bay to the wild stories of the Jersey and Caro- 
lina sandbars too countless for memory, the 
Fireship off Newport, the Shrieking Woman of 
Marblehead, and the Lynn Mariner who, while 
burying his treasure in a cave, was sealed up 
alive by a thunderbolt that cleft the rock, and 
whom some one, under spiritual inspiration, 
spent lately a dozen years in vain endeavor to 
unearth. The parties that have equipped them- 
selves with hazel-rods and spades, and pro- 
ceeded, at the dead of night, in search of these 
riches, without turning their heads or uttering 
the Divine Name, and, digging till they struck 
metal, have met with all manner of ghostly ap- 
pearances, from the little naked negro sitting 
and crying on the edge of the hogshead of 
doubloons, to the ball of fire sailing straight up 
the creek, till it hangs trembling on the tide 
just opposite the excavation into which it 
shoots with the speed of lightning, so terrify- 
ing and bewildering the treasure-seekers that 
when all is over they fail to find again the place 
of their late labor— 4;he parties that have met 
with these adventures would, perhaps, cease to 
waste much more of their time In sucii pursuits 
in this part of the country if they knew that 
Captain Kidd had never landed north of Block 
Island until, with fatal temerity, he brought 
his vessel into Boston, and that every penny of 
his gains was known and was accounted for, 
while as to Bradish Ten and the rest of that 
gentry, they wasted everything as they went in 
riotous living, and could never have had a dol- 
lar to hide, and no disposition to hide it if they 
had ; and whatever they did possess they took 
with them when, quietly abandoning their ships 
to the oCacers of the law, they went up the 



creeks and rivers in boats, and dispersed them- 
selves throughout the country. 

Ever since the time of Jason there have been 
sea-robbers, and at one period they so infested 
the Mediterranean — owning a thousand galleys 
and four hundred cities, it is said — that Porapey 
was eent out with a fleet and a force of soldiery 
to extirpate them. In later times there were 
tribes of lawless men associated together in 
hunting the cattle of the West Indian islands, 
curing the flesh, and exchanging it in adjacent, 
settlements ; they held all property in common, 
and were called Buccaneers, from the word 
" boucan," a Carib term for preserved meat. 
By the mistaken policy of the viceroys of the 
islands, who, in order to reduce them to less 
lawless lives, exterminated all the cattle, these 
men were driven to the sea, and became In 
time the celebrated freebooters, or •' Brethren 
of the Coast." The bull of Pope Alexander VI., 
by authority of which Spain and Portugal 
claimed all American discoveries, caused Eng- 
land, France and the Netherlands to combine 
in the Western Hemisphere, whatever quarrels 
came to hand in the Eastern, and to ravage the 
common enemy — so that letters-of-marque were 
constantly issued by them to all adventurers, 
without requiring any condemnation of prizes 
or account of proceedings, by which means 
these countries virtually created a system of 
piracy, and Sir Francis Drake's sack of St. Do- 
mingo, and the subsequent pillage of Pernam- 
buco, were in nowise different from the ex- 
ploits of the brutal Olonois, Van Horn, and 
Brodely, upon the opulent Spanish cities of the 
Main. As the trade with the East and West In- 
dies increased, these freebooters ceased to sail 
under any color but their own, the black flag ; 
no longer left their ships to march through 
tropical swamps and forests, to float on rafts 
down rivers of a hundred cataracts, to scale 
mountains, and fall, as if out of the clouds, on 
the devoted cities of the Isthmus of Darien, 
the silver and gold of whose cathedrals, palaces 
and treasure-houses were worth the labor ; nor 
did they confine themselves on sea to overhaul- 
ing the Spanish galleon sitting deep in the wa- 
ter with her lading from the Mexican and Peru- 
vian mines ; but they made their attacks on the 
great slow ship of the Asiatic waters, and 
when their suppression became vital to com- 
merce, and all powers united against them, 



THE TRUE ACCOUNT OF CAPTAIN KIDD. 



they possessed themsftlves of sumptuous re- 
treats in Madagascar and the Indian Ocean, 
where they had their seraglios, and lived in 
fabulous splendor and luxury. As this race, 
hunted on sea and enervated on land, died out, 
their place was taken by others, and expedi- 
tions came gradually to be fitted out from the 
colonies of New England, while Virginia, the 
Carolinas, and even the Quakers of Philadel- 
phia, aflbrded them a market for their rob- 
beries. When these also in their time aban- 
doned their profession, they made their homes, 
some in the Carolinas, some in Rhode Island, 
and some on thp south shore of Long Island, 
where their descendants are among the most 
respectable of the community. 

To none of these did Captain Eldd belong ; 
and, previous to the last two years of his life, 
he was esteemed a good citizen, and aa honest 
a sea-captain as ever sailed out of New York, 
to which place he belonged, and where, in the 
Surrogate's office, is still preserved his marriage 
certiiicate, that classifies him as Gentleman. 
During the war with France he had been mas- 
ter of a ship in the neighborhood of the Carib- 
bean Sea, and had valiantly come to the assist- 
ance of a British man-of-war, and the two 
together had vanquished a fleet of six French 
frigates ; it was testified upon his trial that he 
had been a mighty man in the West Indies, and 
that he had refused to go a pirateering, upon 
which his men had seized his ship ; and it was 
on account of his public services there that the 
General Assembly of New York had paid him a 
bounty of one hundred and fifty pounds — a 
great sum in those days ; and the probability 
Is, that, being made a bone of contention be- 
tween political parties, exactly what he was 
applauded for doing at one time he was hung 
for doing at another. 

The American seas being greatly troubled by 
pirates, early in 1695 the King summoned the 
Earl of Bellomont before him, and told him 
that, having come to the determination to put 
an end to the increasing piratical tendencies of 
his colonies, he had chosen him as the most 
suitable person to be invested with the govern- 
ment of New York and New England. The 
earl at once set about devising the readiest 
means for the execution of the King's purpose, 
and Robert Livingston, chancing then to be in 
London, and being acquainted with the earl. 
Introduced to him William Kidd, who, having 
left his wife and children In New York, was 
also then in London, as a person who had se- 
cured some fame in engagements with the 
French, a man of honor and intrepidity, and 
one who, knowing the haunts of the pirates, 
was very fit to command the expedition against 
them which Bellomont and others were plan- 
ning. Livingston became Kidd's surety, a 
kindnes^ that the latter always remembered, 
as he threatened, on his return two years 
afterward, to sell his sloop, and indemnify 
Livingston out of the proceeds, If Bellomont 
did not surrender the bond. 

It was at first proposed that Kidd should 
have a British frigate, but hardly daring to 
give him that — which hesitation in itself indi- 
cates how far the great lords were really impli- 
cated in his transactions — a ship was purchased 
for six thousand pounds, Kidd and Uvlngston 
being at one-flith of the expense, and the rest 
being borne by the Earls of Bellomont and 
Bomney, the Lord Chancellor Somers, the Lord 



High Admiral, the Duke or' Shrewsbury, and 
Sir Edward Harrison, ana they agreed to give 
the King, who entered into it very heartily, a 
tenth of the profits of the affair. Kidd was 
somewhat averse to the plan, and seriously de- 
murred, it is believed, but was threatened by 
the men of power that his own ship should be 
detained and taken from him if he persisted, 
and accordingly he yielded, and in 1696 was 
regularly commissioned under two separate 
parchments, one to cruise against the French, 
and the other — an extraordinary one, but Issued 
under the Great Seal, empowering him to pro- 
ceed against the pirates of the American seas, 
and really given for the purpose of authorizing 
him to dispose of such property as he might 
capture. He had orders to render his accounts 
to the Earl of Bellomont, remotely and securely 
in New England ; and the Adventure Galley, a 
private armed ship of thirty guns and eighty 
men, was brought to the buoy in the Nore at 
the latter end of February, and, on the 23d of 
April, 1696, he sailed in her from Plymouth, 
reaching New York in July, and bringing in a 
French ship, valued at three hundred and fifty 
pounds, which he had taken on the passage, 
and which he there condemned. 

In New York he invited men to enter his ser- 
vice, by notices posted in the streets, and pre- 
senting large offers of booty after forty shares 
for himself and the ship should be deducted ; 
and increasing his crew to more than one hun- 
dred and fifty men, he went to Madeira, then 
to several of the West Indian ports, and after- 
ward to Madagascar, the coast of Malabar, and 
to Bab's Key, an island at the entrance of the 
Red Sea, where he lay in wait for the Mocha 
fleet, then preparing to sail. It is evident that 
he went outside of his nominal instructions by 
thus leaving the American for the Asiatic wa- 
ters ; but it is also evident that he understood 
he was to be supported by the people of power 
who were behind him at home, and believed 
himself to be only following out their inten- 
tions ; and the man who had been encouraged 
to rob one ship had not, perhaps, sufficient re- 
finement of discrimination to think any differ- 
ent matter of robbing another. Moreover, 
having come across and captured no vessel 
since leaving New York, he might naturally 
h^ve felt that his owners were expecting more 
of him, and thus have resolved on something 
desperate. At any rate he did not consider 
himself to be going outside of his duty, or to 
be appearing in any questionable light, when, 
on his voyage out, he met the ship carrying the 
ambassador to the Great Mogul, and exchanged 
courtesies therewith. 

Tired out with his want of success, when an- 
chored at Bab's Key, he sent boats to bring the 
first news of the sailing of the Mocha fleet, es- 
tablished a lookout on the hills of the island, 
and told his men that now he would freight the 
Adventure Galley with gold and silver when 
the fleet came out, though it was found that 
many of Its ships belonged to friendly nations, 
and it was convoyed by an English and a Dutch 
man-of-war. Kidd, however, sailed into the 
midst ofi the fleet, which fired at him first, and 
returning the fire with oue or two ineffectual 
shots, he hauled off and left it to pursue its 
course Sailing then for the coast of Malabar, 
a couple of months afterward Kidd took a Moor- 
ish vessel belonging to Aden, but commanded 
by an Englishman, and finding but little ot 



THE TEUE ACCOUNT OP CAPTAIN KEDD. 




"KIDD SNATCHED UP AN IBON-BOTTND BUCKET AND STKUCK -WIIXIAM UOOBE A BLOW ON THE HEAD, OP 

WHICH HE DIED NEXT DAY." 



value in the prize, he had her men hoisted by 
the arms and beaten with the flat of a cutlass 
to maJie them reveal what ihey had done with 
their money — a punishment which, whether se- 
vere or not for that semi-barbarous era, was, 
with two exceptions, the only act of personal 
cruelty of which he was ever accused ; and peo- 
ple whom, if the general idea of him were true, 
he would have dispatched with a^ bullet,, he 
simply kept in the hold till, inquiry for them 
being over, he dismissed them. He obtained 
firom this vessel some coflFee, pepper, and Ara- 
bian gold, and some myrrh, with which the ex- 
travagant rogue pitched his ship. Going further 
out to sea again, he next encountered a Portu- 
guese man-of-war, but after a brief engagement 
withdrew with ten men wounded, and returned 



presently to the coast of Malabar. Here, his 
cooper having been tilled by the natives, he 
"served them in pretty much the same way," 
says one writer, " as the officers of our late 
South Sea Exploring Expedition: served the 
Fijians, burning their houses and shooting one 
of the murderers." This, however, was one of 
the other instances of cruelty to which refer- 
ence-has just been made, the- murderer being 
bound to a tree and; shot at in turn by all the 
retaliators. Shortly after- this. Captain Kidd 
fell in with the ship Eoyal Captain, which he 
visited, and whose officers he entertained on 
board the Adventure Galley ; but some of her 
crew having told that there were Greeks and 
others on board with much wealth of precious 
stones, the piratical spirit of his men led to. 



THE TEITE ACCOUNT OP CAPTAIN KWD. 



mutinous desires and expressions ; and, in a 
rage with those who had wished to board and 
rob the Royal Captain, Kidd snatched up an 
Iron-bound bucket, and struck William Moore, 
the gunner and chief grumbler, a blow on the 
head, of which he died next day. Kidd re- 
marked to his surgeon that the death of the 
gunner did not trouble him so much as other 
passages of his voyage, as he had friends in 
England who could easily bring him off for 
that ; and he himself had it urged as a virtuous 
act rather than otherwise, since done to pre- 
vent both piracy and mutiny. 

Still on the coast of Malabar, in November he 
ran across another Moorish vessel, and artfully 
hoisted the French colors, upon which the Moor 

did the same. " By ! have I catched you ?" 

he cried ; " you are a free prize to England !" 
and making easy conquest of her, he caused 
one Le Roy, a French passenger, to act the 
part of master, and to show a pretended French 
pass, upon which he declared her formally a 
prize to England, as if observing again the pre- 
scribed forms, and intending to claim for his 
conduct, should he ever need to do so, the pro- 
tection of the commission authorizing him to 
take French ships. In the course of the next 
month, December, he captured a Moorish ketch 
of fifty tons, and turned her adrift ; took about 
four hundred pounds' worth from a Portuguese, 
and sunk her near Calcutta; and then made 
prize of an Armenian vessel of four hundred 
tons, called the Quedagh Merchant, and some- 
times the Scuddee, and commanded by an 
Englishman — the entire value of the latter cap- 
ture being sixty-four thousand pounds, of which 
Kidd's share was about sixteen thousand. Kidd 
then went to Madagascar, where, having ex- 
changed all the equipments of the Adventure 
Galley for dust and bar gold and silver, silks, 
gold-cloth, precious stones, and spices, he 
burned that ship, which was leaking badly, and 
took to the Quedagh Merchant, refusing a ran- 
som of thirty thousand rupees which the Arme- 
nians came, crying and wringing their hands, 
to offer him. 

Here, too, he is said to have met with one 
of the East India Company's ships. Captain 
CuUiford, turned pirate. It was clearly his 
duty, under his commission, to offer battle at 
once ; but, instead of anything of the kind, 
it was testified on the trial that when the pi- 
races, with bated breath, sent out a boat to in- 
quire concerning his intentions, he drank with 
them, in a kind of lemonade called " bomboo," 
damnation to his own soul if he ever harmed 
them, and exchanged gifts with CuUiford, re- 
ceiving some silk and four hundred pounds in 
return for some heavy ordnance. Kidd denied 
that he had ever been aboard of CuUiford, and 
declared that, when he proposed to attack him, 
his men said they would rather fire two shots 
into tiim than one into CuUiford ; that they 
Btole his journal, broke open his chest and rifled 
it, plundered his ammunition, and threatened 
his life so that he was obliged to barricade him- 
eelf in liis cabin — ^his statement being borne out 
in some degree by the fact that here ninety-five 
of his men deserted to Captain CuUiford, as if 
their own master were not sufficiently piratical, 
whereupon, recruiting a handful of men, he 
sailed immediately for the West Indies. He de- 
clared further that he did not go on board the 
Quedagh Merchant untU after the desertion of 
these men, which left only about a dozen in Ills 



crew — not enough to keep his leaking craft 
from sinking. 

But the capture of the Quedagh Merchant had 
been reported home by the East India Company, 
and directions had been issued to aU the Ame- 
rican governors and viceroys to seize him 
wherever he should appear. At Anguilla he 
learned that he had been offlciaUy proclaimed 
a pirate, and failing to obtain any provisions 
either there or at St. Thomas, at which latter 
place he was not even allowed to land, he went 
to Curagoa, from whence inteUigence of his 
whereabouts was forwarded to England, and 
the man-of-war Queensborough was sent in pur- 
suit of him. 

Kidd was aware that he had been upon a 
hazardous enterprise, so far as the risks at 
home were considered, to say nothing of the 
risks at sea ; and whether he was conscious 
that he had exceeded his instructions, too 
eagerly misinterpreting them, or whether he 
knew that it is a way with the great to sacrifice 
those who compromise them too seriously, he 
prepared himself for any fortune : he deter- 
mined to go to New York, and prove for him- 
self what protection and countenance he now 
had to expect from Beliomont and the others ; 
but he also determined to venture as Uttle as 
possible, and he accordingly bought the sloop 
Antonia — though excusing this afterward to the 
earl by saying that his men, frightened by the 
proclamation, had wished to run the ship 
ashore, and so many of them left him that 
again he had not enough to handle the ropes, 
which must have been untrue — loaded her with 
his silks, muslins, jewels, bullion and gold-dust 
(the rest of his booty, consisting of bales of 
coarse goods, sugar, iron, rice, wax, opium, 
saltpetre and anchors, he left in the Quedagh 
Merchant, moored on the souih side of Hispa- 
niola, with twenty guns in the hold and thirty 
mounted, and twenty men, with his mate in 
command) — and sailed in her for New York; 
intimating, by his action, a doubt of his re- 
ception, though that might weU be accounted 
for by a knowledge of the King's proclamation, 
but just as plainly intimating that he had reason 
to rely on the promises of Beliomont and the 
rest of that royal stock company in piracy. 

Meanwhile Beliomont had been delayed from 
entering upon his oflicial life by one thing and 
another, untU two years had elapsed from the 
time of Kidd's departure from England. On 
arriving in New York, he heard of the rumored 
career which Kidd was running, and presently 
the news having reached England, and an ac- 
count of the public sentiment about it there 
being returned to him, Beliomont felt that very 
active measures were necessary in order to ex- 
culpate himself, ttfe Ministry and the King from 
the popular accusation of participating in Kidd's 
robberies, and took every step necessary for his 
apprehension. 

Needing some repairs before reaching his 
destination, Kidd very cautiously put into Dela- 
ware Bay, where he landed a chest belonging 
to one GiUam, an indubitable pirate, who had 
been a Mohammedan, and who now returned, 
a passenger firom Madagascar. The news 
spreading up the coast, an armed sloop went 
after Kidd, but faUed to find him, and he 
reached the eastern end of Long Island with- 
out being overhauled. Entering the Sound, 
he dispatched a letter to Beliomont, and from 
Oyster Bay sent loving greeting to his fami y, 



THE TEUE ACCOUNT OP CAPTAIN KIDD. 



and a lawyer, by the name of Emot, came down 
from New York and went on board the An- 
tonia. Learning that the Earl of Bellomont 
was In Boston, Kidd altered his coui'se for 
Rhode Island, and, arriving there, sent Mr. 
Emot to Boston to secure a. promise of safety 
from Bellomont If he should land ; a promise 
granted on condition of its proving that Emot 
told the truth — he having asserted that Kldd's 
men locked him up while they committed pi- 
racies. Kidd then went to Block Island, and 
wrote to Bellomont again, protesting his inno- 
cence, urging the care he had taken of the 
owner's interests, and sending Lady Bellomont 
a present of jewels of the value of sixty 
pounds, which Bellomont had her keep lest she 
should offend the giver and prevent the devel- 
opments that he desired, though afterward 
Burrendering and adding them to the general in- 
ventory of Kidd's effects. While at Block Island 
he was joined by his wife and children, under 
the care of a Mr. Clark ; he then gratefully went 
out of his way In order to land Mr. Clark on 
Gardiner's Island, as that gentleman wished to 
return to New York ; and although Kidd him- 
self did not go ashore at the latter place, he 
left with Mr. Gardiner a portion of his treasure 
afterward abamjoned to the Commissioners 
sent for it by the Governor. While lying here, 
three sloops from New York came down and 
were loaded with goods, which were, however, 
all recovered — Kidd maintaining, with so much 
paucity of invention as to resemble the truth, 
that it was his men and not he who shipped 
them off. Meanwhile the earl sent down Dun- 
can Campbell, the postmaster at Boston, to in- 
vite Captain Kidd to that port, telling him that 
if innocent he might safely come in, and he 
would intercede for his pardon ; and Kidd 
straightway headed the Antonia for Boston, 
reaching there on the 1st of July and appear- 
ing publicly upon the streets. Hearing of his 
arrival, the earl sent for him, and, refusing to 
see him without witnesses, examined him be- 
fore the Council, directed him to draw up a nar- 
rative of his proceedings, and dismissed him. 
Bellomont, however, kept a watch upon his 
movements, as he both desired and needed his 
arrest, but thought it expedient to use friendly 
means in order to discover the extent of his 
outrages and the disposition of the property 
acquired through them. At the end of the 
week, Kidd showing no intention to unbosom 
himself in that wise, and it being feared that 
he meant to make off, he was arrested and 
committed to prison, though not till he had 
made a valiant opposition and had drawn his 
sword upon the King's officers — the arrest 
taking place near the door of the earl's lodg- 
ings, into which Kidd ruslied and ran toward 
liim, followed by the constables. His sloop, on 
that, was immediately appraised, its contents 
taken possession of by certain Commissioners 
appointed for that purpose, his papers, contain- 
ing accounts of his buried treasure and of that 
in Mr. Gardiner's hands, were opened, and all 
the property was finally delivered to the earl, 
with an inventory of one thousand one hun- 
dred and eleven ounces of gold, two thousand 
three hundred and fifty-three ounces of silver, 
three-score jewels, and bags, bales and pieces 
of goods about as valuable as the precious 
metals. Mrs. Kirtd's property, which included 
several pieces of plate, nearly three hundred 
dollars of her own and twenty-five crowns of 



her maid's, was taken out of her temporary 
lodgings in the house of Duncan Campbell, at 
the time when search was made for a bag of 
gold-dust and ingots of the value of a thousand 
pounds, that Kidd had intended for a gift to 
Lady Bellomont, and that was found between 
two sea-beds ; but on petition the Governor 
and Council restored to Mrs. Kidd her own. 
His wife — to whom he had been but a few 
years married — accompanying him with her 
children, her maid and aU that she possessed, 
shows that Kidd had no intention of being sur- 
prised and overmastered ; but on the contrary, 
if worse came to worst, that he had meant to 
take her back to the Quedagh Merchant and 
find a home in some place beyond the pale of 
British justice ; while retaining her affection, 
and caring to retain it, is in itself a sort of 
testimony that he was hardly so black as he 
has been painted. Ten days after his arrest 
news came that the mate of the Quedagh Mer- 
chant, left in command, had taken out her 
cargo, removed it to Curagoa, and had then 
set her on fire, and the mariner who brought 
the intelligence had seen her burning. That 
was a dark day, doubtless, to Captain Kidd, 
but not so dark as others yet to come. 

A ship-of-war had now been dispatched 
from England to take Captain Kidd over there, 
but being delayed by inclement weather, and 
putting back in a storm after he was on board, 
by the time it arrived in the Thames all Eng- 
land was in a state of excitement over his 
alleged partnership with several of the Minis- 
ters, and their apparent determination not to 
bring him to justice ; and from a common 
malefactor he became the lofty subject of a 
state trial. 

On his arrival the House of Commons ad- 
dressed the King, asking to have Kidd's trial 
postponed until the next Parliament, that there 
might be time for the transmission of all the 
existing documents having any relation to hia 
affairs ; and he was accordingly condned in 
Newgate until the next year, when the papers 
were laid before the House, together with a 
petition from Cogi Baba, on behalf of himself 
and other Armenians, subjects of the King of 
Persia, setting forth all the facts of the 
Quedagh Merchant's capture, and praying for 
Kidd's examination and their own relief. Cogi 
Baba was ordered before the House, and Kidd 
himself was produced at the bar, and afterward 
remanded to prison. A motion was then made 
in the House to declare void the grant made to 
the Earl of Bellomont and others of aU the treas- 
ure taken by Kidd, but it was negatived, and 
the House of Commons then requested the 
King to have Kidd proceeded against according 
to law, and he was brought to trial at the Old 
Bailey, in 1701, for murder and piracy upon 
the high seas. 

At the same time, the House of Commons 
was proceeding upon an impeachment of the 
Earl of Oxford and Lord Somers, for certain 
high crimes and misdemeanors, one of which 
was their connection with Kidd, and their 
agency in passing the commissions and grant 
to him, as prejudicial to public service and 
private trade, and dishonorable to the King, 
contraiy to the law of England and to the bill of 
rights. It was urged in reply that a pirate 
was kostis humnni generis, and his goods be- 
longed to whomsoever it might be that de- 
stroyed him, and the King granted title only to 



8 



THE TBUE ACCOUNT OF CAPTAIN KIDD. 



that for which no owner was to be found. Be- 
fore the lords were acquitted Bellomont was 
dead, and Kidd was hung ; while popular feel- 
ing ran high, parties took sides in the affair ; 
there were accusations afloat that these lords, 
now on their own trial, had set the Great Seal 
of England to the pardon of the arch-pirate ; 
and as the anti-Ministerial side was determined 
to hang Kidd in order to prove the complicity 
and giult of the Ministers with him, the Minis- 
ters themselves were, of course, determined to 
hang him to prove their own innocence. 

Kidd made a very good appearance upon his 
trial, ignorant as he was of all the forms of 
law ; he insisted on his innocence, and that he 
had only captured ships with French passes or 
sailing under the French flag, and he fought 
manfully, but to no purpose. Of the men that 
were tried with him, several plead that they 
surrendered themselves upon a certain procla- 
mation of the King's pardon, but the Court de- 
cided that, not having surrendered themselves 
to the designated persons, they did not come 
within its provisions, and they must swing for 
it, and so they did. A couple of servants were 
acquitted ; but to Kidd himself no mercy was 
shown. Justice Turton, Dr. Newton, Advocate 
for the Admiralty, and the Lord Chief Baron, 
all made elaborate arguments against him, 
while no one spoke for him ; and all his pre- 
vious plunderings were allowed to be cited in 
the Court, in order to prove that he plundered 
the Quedagh Merchant. When he desired to 
have counsel assigned him, Sir Salathiel Lovell, 
the Recorder, wonderingly asks him, " What 
would you have counsel for ?" And Dr. Ox- 
enden contemptuously inquires, " What matter 
of law can you have ?" But as Kidd quietly 
answers, " There be matters of law, my lord," 
the Recorder asks again, " Mr. Kidd, do you 
know what you mean by matters of law ?" 
Whereupon Kidd replies as quietly as before, 
'* I know what I mean ; I desire to put off 
my trial as long as I can, till I can get my evi- 
dence ready." He has had but a fortnight's 
notice of his trial, and knowing how important 
a delay would be to him in which the popular 
feeling might die out or abate, he urges, " I 
beg your lordships' patience till I can procure 
my papers. I had a couple of French passes, 
which I must make use of to my justification," 
and presently adds, " I beg your lordships I 
may have counsel admitted, and that my trial 
may be put off ; I am not really prepared for 
it." To which the Recorder rudely replies, 
" Nor never will, if you can help it." 

Kidd still contended for counsel, and at last 
It was assigned to him. It then appeared that he 
had already petitioned for money to carry on his 
trial, and though it had, as a matter of course, 
been granted to him, as to any prisoner, it had 
been put into his hands only on the night be- 
fore. His counsel, for whose services he had 
so exerted himself, made one or two timid re- 
marks, but, after tlie jury were sworn, although 
the Solicitor-General plied the witnesses with 
leading questions, the cowardly lawyers never 
cross-examined, made any plea, or opened their 
lips. 

The indictment for murder, upon which Kidd 
was first tried, portrayed, with great particu- 
larity, the blow struck the gunner, saying that 
of that mortal bruise "the aforesaid William 
Moore, from the thirtieth day of October * * * 
until the one-and-thirtieth day ♦ • * did 



languish, and languishing did live," but on the 
one-and-thirtieth day did die, and declaring 
that William Kidd feloniously, voluntarily and 
of malice aforethought did kill and murder him; 
to all of which Kidd plead not guilty, constantly 
interrupting the Court with his exclamations 
and explanations. " The passes were seized by 
my Lord Bellomont ; that we will prove as 
clear as the day !" cries he. When invited to 
find cause for exception in the jury, he either 
adroitly or ingenuously answers, " I shall chal- 
lenge none ; I know nothing to the contrary 
but they are honest men." The time coming 
for his defense, he told in an earnest manner a 
short and simple story, but one in which, by 
comparison of the various witnesses, several 
discrepancies with the truth were found. " My 
lord," said he, *' I will tell you what the case 
was. I was coming up within a league of the 
Dutchman, and some of my men were making 
a mutiny about taking her, and my gunner told 
the people he could put the captain in a way to 
take the ship and be safe. Says I, ' How will 
you do that ?' The gunner answered, ' We will 
get the captain and men aboard.' ' And what 
then ?' ' We will go aboard the ship and plun- 
der her, and we will have it under their hands 
that we did not take her.' "Says I, 'This is 
Judas-like. I dare not do such a thing.' Says 
he, ' We may do it, we are beggars already.' 
' Why,' says I, ' may we take this ship because 
we are poor ?' Upon that a mutiny arose, so I 
took up a bucket and just throwed it at him, 
and said, ' You are a rogue to make such a mo- 
tion.' This I can prove, my lord." 

But he did not prove it, and though he Strug- 
gled hard to do so, and though his faithful 
servant Richard Barlicorn, also on trial for his 
life, must have committed a hundred perjuries 
in his behalf, the Court could not find evidence 
of any mutiny for more than a month before the 
gunner's death, and decided that William 
Moore's outcry that Kidd had brought him and 
many others to ruin was not suflicient provoca- 
tion for the killing. And though Kidd, plead 
that striking the man in a passion, with so rude 
and unpremeditated a weapon as the first slush- 
bucket at hand, If not justifiable as a prevent- 
ive ot mutiny, was, at furtliest, no more than 
manslaughter, and exclaimed that " it was not 
designedly done, but in his passion, for which 
he was heartily sorry," yet, it being deter- 
mined to hang him at all odds, the lawyers 
were given hints, the witnesses were brow- 
beaten, and the jury were instructed, after 
tedious iteration, to bring him in guilty ; which 
was done. 

At the trial next day on the indictments for 
piracy, Kidd did not lose heart. There were 
but two important mtnesses produced against 
him. Palmer, one of his crew, and his ship's 
surgeon, Bradinham, who, though both of 
them sharers in his adventures, had become evi- 
dence for the Crown on the promise of their 
own safety. Kidd himself cross-questioned 
them, but Idly, their replies being always 
straightforward and consistent. His only de- 
fense was that he had taken French passes ftom 
every capture, that the Earl of Bellomont had 
seized them, and that his men, once catching 
sight of a French pass when a ship was over- 
hauled, would not let that ship go, and for the 
rest answered with indifference, " That is what 
these witnesses say," as if such depraved testi- 
mony could really be worth nothing. " Did you 



THE TRUE ACCOUNT OF CAPTAIN KIDD. 



7 



hear me say so ?" he demanded of Palmer once. 
*' I heard you say so," was the reply. " I am 
Bure," said Kidd then, contemptuously, "you 
never heard me say such a word to such a log- 
gerhead as you." But matters going beyond 
his patience soon, " Hear me !" he cried indig- 
nantly, but was silenced by the Court, only to 
break out again presently on Palmer with, 
" Certainly you have not the Impudence to say 
that !" and to adjure him to " speak true." 
By-and-by the question of one of the passes be- 
ing up, " Palmer, did you see that pass ?" he 
eagerly asks ; and, the old subordinate manner 
returning to the other man, he answers, " In- 
deed, captain, I did not ;" whereupon, like one 
who throws up his hands in despair, Kidd ex- 
claims, " What boots it to ask him any ques- 
tions ? We have no witnesses, and what we 
say signifies nothing." With Bradinham he is 
less contemptuous and more enraged. " This 
man contradicts himself in a hundred places !" 
he declared. " He tells a thousand lies * * ♦ 
There was no such thing in November; he 
knows no more of these things than you do. 
This fellow used to sleep five or six months to- 
gether In the hold ! * * It is hard," he ex- 
claims after awhile, " that a couple of rascals 
should take away the King's subjects' lives. 
Because I-jiid not turn pirate, you rogues, you 
would make me one !" And, with that, hope 
Blips faster and faster away from his grasp, and 
when the Solicitor-General would know if he 
has anything further to ask of the witnesses, he 
replies, " No, no ! So long as he swears it, our 
worda or oaths cannot be takea. No, no," he 



continues, wearily, " it signifies nothing." But 
he does ask at last one other question. " Mr. 
Bradinham," he cries, bitterly, " are not you 
promised your life to take away mine ?" and a 
little later he adds, with dignity, " I will not 
trouble the Court any more, for it is a folly," 
and when the final word of the Judge has been 
uttered, that he shall be taken thence to his 
execution, he says, " My lord, it is a very hard 
sentence. For my part, I am the innocentest 
person of them all, only I have been sworn 
against by perjured persons." 

The feeling against Kidd, though, was hardly 
satisfied even by his death ; and fearful lest 
they had lost a victim, after all, the public cir- 
culated stories of his escape, and of the hanging 
of a man of straw In his place, although if the 
" blunt monster with uncounted heads " had 
taken the trouble to use one of those heads, the 
absurdity of i;he rumor might have been evident; 
for Kidd's evil fortune pursued him even from 
the scaffold, and the rope breaking, doubled 
and prolonged the last awful moments, and 
between the first hanging and the final one 
he was heard to have conversation with the 
executioner, ere passing to that Bar where 
he was judged, let us hope, after a different 
fashion. 

But the death of Captain Kidd put an end to 
piracy in the American and most other seas ; 
and, in the meantime, so far from lying con- 
cealed to enrich the poor treasure-seekers of 
our coasts, all the gains of Captain Kidd, ill- 
gotten at the best, have gone to swell the reve- 
nues of the Eoglisb Kingdom. 



CHARIESTOWN. 



The traveler who seeks the cool northeast 
seaside is scarcely aware how near it Is to him 
when, after his wearisome journey, he crosses 
the narrow and croolsed streets which are Bos- 
ton's crown of picturesque glory, and leaves 
the city by the Eastern Eailway. For no sooner 
has the train moved out of the station than the 
sea-views begin to open on him as he goes — 
vistas of the broad, blue bay; streams just 
emptying In ; salt marshes, rich with every tint 
and every odor ; the bold bluffs of Nahant ; the 
long lines and lonely houses of the Chelsea 
beaches ; forts far away in the harbor, where 
the flag waves like a blossom on its reed ; and 
town alter town, all more or less historic, and 
all full of the wild sea-breath that gives such a 
bloom to the facesof their women, and such a 
vigor to their men. He has hardly crossed the 
Jirst bridge before one of these towns rises on 
his sight, sitting on her hUl the while as fair as 
any pictured city of walls and towers, and over- 
looking the Mystic and the Charles, and the 
wide and windy bay. Indeed, a lovelier view 
of any town I do not know than Charlestown, 
when seen ft-om the car window, her lights re- 
flected in the water at her feet, and her streets 
lifted in tier over tier, tUl the lofty spire of the 
hill-top church glitters in the moon or starlight 
far above them aU. " 

It is not so charming a spot, however, npon 
nearer acquaintance, for most of its streets are 
as narrow as those of the neighboring metropo- 
lis, and not one-half so clean, and it is more in- 
teresting as a congregation of workshops, 
foundries, and great industrial establishments, 
than in any other light ; for, owing to the cir- 
cumstance of five towns having been set off 
from it, and a part of foirr others, it has now 
the smallest territory of any town in the State 
of Massachusetts, and is necessarily crowded. 
Running along the waterside is the Navy Yard, 
surrounded by a massive granite wall, ten feet 
high, and encircling the barracks both for ma- 
rines and officers and their families, together 
with the great machine-shops, ropewalks, ship- 
yards, wharves, dry-docks, and other Govern- 
ment works on a vast scale, thronged with two 
thousand busy artisans, and all guarded by sen- 
tries pacing their perpetual round, and by the 
receiving-ship Ohio, anchored in the stream 
beyond. This whole agglomeration of men 



and trades forms a strong political element In 
its locality, and a prominent and potential 
member of Congress has been heard to declare 
that he once staid six weeks in Washington 
after the session in order to secure the appoint- 
ment of a common painter in the Navy Yard, 
and failed at last. 

The State Prison, another lion of the place^ 
Is a machine hardly less powerful, as any one 
might easily imagine who saw it entrenched 
behind its perpendicular fortifications and rows 
of spikes, and thought of the number of of- 
ficials necessary to carry on its operations and 
maintain order among its unhappy denizens. 
It is a gloomy-looking fabric, like all the tra- 
ditional prisons " that slur the sunshine half a 
mile," and a satirist has mentioned the fact as 
characteristic of certain inconsistencies between 
theory and practice common in Massachusetts, 
that almost the only place within her borders 
where a liberty-cap is displayed is at the top of 
her State Prison, not so glaring an inconsist- 
ency, nevertheless, as It at first sight appears, 
since the imprisonment of criminals means the 
freedom of all the rest of society. 

In quite another portion of Charlestown 
stands the famous Bunker Hill Monument, 
making the most attractive feature of the 
town, with its gray shaft rising in perfect 
symmetry from the ample space at the sum- 
mit of a lofty and smoothly-swarded green 
hill. Here the statue of Warren Is to be found, 
with various trophies of the Revolution, less 
interesting in themselves than are the sugges- 
tions of the scene — a scene that calls up one 
morning, almost a hundred years ago, with the 
unquailing farmers gathered behind their 
breastworks of sod and hay, and the flashing 
bayonets and scarlet lines of British grenadiers 
moving up the hill, while the town below was 
blazing In a conflagration of every dwelling 
there ; that calls up another morning fifty 
years later, where trembling old hands, that, 
when youth and chivalry were at flood, helped 
to lay the corner-stone of the Republic, now 
in the midst of its success laid the corner-stone 
of this monument to one of its first struggles 
for existence, and, in the presence of the sur- 
vivors of that struggle, the thunders of Web- 
ster's eloquence were answered by the thun- 
ders of the people's applause. Who is it that 



CHAELESTOWN. 



9 



declares the Inclosure at Bunker Hill peculiarly 
typical of our national cbaracteristics, inas- 
much as, being badly beaten there, we built a 
monument to the fact, and have never ceased 
boasting thereof? One thing can certainly 
be said in reply, that the moral effect in teach- 
ing the enemy how sadly in earnest the brave 
rebels were, and in encouraging the disiiirited 
patriots by sight cf raw recruits thrice break- 
ing the form of the invading veterans, was 
sometliing inestimable ; that rail fence stuffed 
with meadow-hay was not merely the breast- 
work of Putnam and Prescott, it was the first 
redoubt of freedom the wide world over, and 
from Bunker Hill began that march of noble 
thought and grand action across this continent 
which is destined to overthrow all tyrannies, 
both of intellect and of empire, in this hemi- 
sphere to-day, to-morrow in the other. It gives 
one a very satisfactory emotion of patriotism to 
stand on Bunker Hill, as well as a good idea ot 
the recuperative power of the country, for 
when the enemy drove every soul out of 
Charlestown, and burned every building there, 
it was but fiive hundred houses in all that were 
destroyed, while to-day the population ap- 
proaches the number of forty thousand. It is 
a population, however, that must have under- 
gone many changes ; as, for instance, one 
would fancy that its action of thirty years ago, 
in the destruction of the Ursuline Convent, 
would, at present, be quite impossible, since 
the Catholic Church now far outnumbers any 
other single sect in the place — for the Catholic 
Church has a subtle, selt-healing way with it 
like that belonging to some natural organism, 
so that where it has received a wound, thither 
it immei' lately sends its best and freshest blood 
to repair the harm, as the case is with the limb 
of an animal or the branch of a tree, and thus 
mending itself and growing with greater vigor 
where the hurt was, it presently outstrips in- 
jury, and plants itself in the place of its assail- 
ant. 

The Ursuline Convent Just mentioned be- 
longed, at the time of its demolition, to one of 
the congregations of Ursulines founded some 
three hundred years earlier as a religious sis- 
terhood for nursing the sick, relieving and in- 
structing the poor, and named for the martyred 
St. Ursula, a Christian princess of Britain, and 
one of the first to associate maidens with her- 
self for devout purposes. Originally every Sis- 
ter remained in her own home, and performed 
from that point such duties as were hers ; but 
shortly after the death of Angela Merici, the 
foundress, they adopted a uniform dress, their 
principles and plan of action became more 
widely spread, and they gradually gathered 
together under the same roof, chose a Direct- 
ress, or Superior, and to k some simple vows, 
vows afterward exchanged for others of a more 
solemn nature. In the year 1860 there were 
more thau five hundred houses of Ursulines in 
the world ; and, never entirely abandoning 
their original purpose, they are to-day princi- 
pally devoted to the tuition and care of young 
girls ; and of such benefit to the general com- 
munity have they always been considered, that, 
when certain European Governments nut an end 
to the existence of convents within their ter- 
ritory, the Ursulines were permitted to remain 
unmolested, and were moreover aided and en- 
couraged in their work. The ruins of the 
Ursuline Convent in Charlestown stand in a 



remote part of the town, lately taken into the 
village of Somerville, on a place known as 
Mount Benedict, and smoke-blackened and 
weather-beaten, the broken walls and chimneys 
have stood for more than thirty years till be- 
coming picturesque with time. Wild cherry 
trees have sprung up within the walls of the 
cloisters, and have grown into full bearing of 
their bitter fruit ; cattle browse among them, 
and lie beneath the great trees that have arched 
themselves, untaught, over the old avenues ; 
sheep crop the turf where once the nuns' flower- 
garden may have been, and where, long since, 
the natural growth of the place has retaken its 
own rights, and where here and there a weed 
blooms, which is only a garden-flower returned 
to its one original stock. One side of the hill com- 
mands the harbor and the placid Charles, with 
a view of the neighboring metropolis, just re- 
mote enough for a haze of distance to render 
it poetic ; and on the other side, far away 
across meadows and bending elms, the blue 
and lovely Mystic winds to the sea, and soft, 
low hUls inclose the wide and varied land- 
scape. It is a retreat of peace, that now re- 
mains unbroken by anything except the rude- 
ness of the winter storms, but it bears upon it 
the moss-grown marks of a violence sadly in 
contrast, for thirty-five years ago it was the 
scene of an outrage on human rights and free- 
dom of thought, which, it is to be hoped, neither 
this country nor this age shall behold again. 
The convent had been founded in 1820 by Doc- 
tors Matigon and Cheverus with funds contribu- 
ted for that purpose by a resident and native of 
the city of Boston ; and upon their urgency a 
few Sisters of the Ursuline Order came to this 
country, and made Boston their home. The 
confinement and the city air, however, dis- 
turbed their health, accustomed as they had 
been to the out-door exercise of their gardens, 
and, some half-dozen years after their arrival, 
the bishop procured for them the estate in 
Charlestown, to which they immediately re- 
moved, occupying a farmhouse at the foot of 
the hill till their own residence upon the sum- 
mit should be completed. This was done in the 
next year, and it was shortly so crowded with 
pupils from New England, the West Indies, 
Southern States and British provinces, that a 
couple of years afterward two large wings were 
added to the establishment, the number of nuns 
varying from four to ten, and the pupils from 
fifty to sixty. 

The feeling In Charlestown toward them 
could hardly ever have been of a hospitable 
nature, for one of the Selectmen of the town, 
who appears to have been of a very inflammable 
temperament, told the Superior that it had 
been his intention on the first night of the 
occupancy of the farmhouse by the nuns to 
come with thirty men and tear it down about 
their ears, but he was deterred by the quiet 
procession of the little company taking their 
walks across the hill next daj', which appears 
to have been a moving sight to him. Welcome 
or not, however, the school prospered wonder- 
fully, as indeed it could hardly help doing when 
the teachers were so devoted to their duties, 
the fact of their being devoted for life being 
probably the chief secret of their success. 
There was then comparatively little attention 
paid to science and the severer studies gen- 
erally, and the education of women was con- 
fined almost especially to the accomplishments 



10 



CHAELESTOWN. 



of language, music, and painting, wliicli were 
taught here to perfection ; and, thronired with 
pupils and applicants, it is possible the school 
aroused the jealousy of those who conjectured 
the good income which it yearly added to 
the revenues of a Church they abominated. 
There was no need, though, of adding this 
jealousy to the elements at work in the neigh- 
borhood already distrustful of Eoman Catholic 
institutions, keeping a vigilant lookout over 
what it considered as little less than a branch 
of the Inquisition introduced into the midst of 
it, constantly fearful of Catholic supremacy — 
not fi'om any largeness of view concerning the 
Church as a Church of authority denying the 
right of individual opinion, and thus a drag 
upon the wheels of progress, but with an im- 
agination inflamed by the wood-cuts of " Fox's 
Book of Martyrs," by such legends as that old 
one of the unfaithful nun, sealed up alive in a 
wall, and regarding the quiet buililing on the 
hill not as a place of innocent merriment and 
girlish study, but of severe penance, of hor- 
rible punishment, of, underground cells and 
passages through which all the mighty power of 
the Church walked abroad to crush any refrac- 
tory spirit into death or submission. There were 
sad rumors of barbarities exercised upon the 
sick, of a child sent away in an advanced stage 
of scarlet-fever, of fearful penances imposed 
upon a djlng nun. It was also urged that the 
Convent made great eflort to secure the chil- 
dren of Protestants for proselyting purposes, 
excluding the cliildren of Catholics ; oblivious 
of the truth that its doors were open to all who 
were able to meet the cost of such expensive 
education, that, its pupils being chiefly daugh- 
ters of the wealthy, there really belonged to 
Catholic parents a proportion of them corre- 
sponding to the proportion of wealthy Catholics 
in the community at large, while for poorer 
Catholics a free school already existed in Bos- 
ton, where their education was provided for 
quite suitably to their probable station in life ; 
and in the meantime not a single pupil, in all 
the number I educated in the convent, had ever 
become a nun, nor had one even been con- 
verted to Catholicism. But more than this in- 
herited dread of papacy and its influence were 
the swarms of suspicions of another sort. It 
makes one doubtful of the inherent worth of 
human nature to hear the baseness of conjecture 
indulged in by these people ; it seems as if 
they were so vile themselves that they could 
believe in the virtue of no others ; because 
priests assumed to be celibate and niins to be 
virgin, they denounced the good bishop as a 
monster and the stainless Sisters as prodigies 
of impurity. And as time wore on, and all 
these unfortunate feelings and fancies glowed 
more and more hotly, it needed but a single 
spark to kindle the flame of intolerance into 
open action among this population, watchful, 
and ready to give the worst possible construc- 
tion to every simple circumstance. 

The flame was kindled quickly enough. In 
the summer of 1834 there were fifty-four young 
girls, from all parts of the country, students in 
the convent, and ten nuns resident there — two 
of the latter being novices, and therefore doing 
nothing in the schoolroom. Of these flfty-four 
young girls, it is probable that nearly all took 
music-lessons, while there appear to have been 
but two of the nuns attending to music — one 
Of these an invalid already in consumption — so 



that the greater part of the hundred and odd 
music-lessons a week fell to the share of the 
other — Sister Mary John, formerly, when in 
the world and retaining the name of her birth, 
a Miss Ehzabeth Harrison. Miss Harrison was 
a native of Philadelphia, had passed her noviti- 
ate of two years, and had for four years been a 
member in full communion. She had a brother 
and a brother-in-law living in Boston, across 
the bridge, and visiting her at the convent 
whenever they chose ; and as she had, besides, 
unrestricted opportunities of reposing coi fl- 
dence in her pupils, had she desired to be 
taken from the convent nothing would have 
been easier — all the more as no restraint was 
put upon an individual there ; and two nuns 
who had taken the vail had left, without let or 
hindrance, and still maintained friendly rela- 
tions with the Superior. She had been giving 
steadily fourteen lessons a day of forty-five 
minutes each ; any one who has studied or 
taught music, or who has been present during 
a lesson in that art, knows wh it an exquisitely 
trying tiling to the nerves it is, and Miss Har- 
rison was not only tired and weak, Ijut her 
brain was in a state of high excitement. Sev- 
eral members of her family had been subject 
to occasional mental alienation — a circum- 
stance of which bad the Ursulines been aware 
upon her reception among them, they would 
probably have allotted her less fati.;uing du- 
ties. Old Dr. Warren had already pronounced 
Miss Harrison's health to be very delicate ; al- 
ways in excessively cold or warm weather she 
had trouble in her head, and feeling this quite 
badly, at about the last of July, she bad fool- 
ishly taken an emetic which had acted strangely 
with her ; she began to manifest great rest- 
lessness, went about the house acting extrava- 
gantly, clamoring for new instruments, setting 
the doors wide open as if to cool her fever, 
and when, one afternoon, the Superior told 
her that she Jooked too iU to be attending 
to the lessons, she replied by a burst of 
laughter, and her nervous excitement culmi- 
nating in delirium as the heat of the day in- 
ci-eased, she slipped out of the convent, into 
the grounds, and away to a neighbor's house, 
unobserved by the Sisters, who would never 
have dreamed of such a thing, as she was a 
person incapable of disguising her feelings, and 
had never before been heard to express the 
least dissatisfaction, but of whom, on the con- 
trary, it was thouglit that there could not be a 
happier person than she in the whole Ursuline 
Order. From the neighbor's house she was 
taken by the Selectman, himself another neigh- 
bor, and the one who had at first intended to 
tear down the farmhouse about the nuns', ears, 
to the residence of a gentleman in West Cam- 
bridge, after which, going to the convent, he 
notified the Superior of what he had done, and 
on the next day the brother of the young lady 
went to see her. Probably the rest from her 
labors and the change of scene had already 
acted beneficially on Miss Harrison's mind, for 
sh6 implored her brother to bring Bishop Fen- 
wick to her, as if she longed for his assistance 
in regaining her self-control. It would seem 
that the bishop had been disinclined to inter- 
fere ; but, on the solicitation of the Superior, he 
went with Miss Harrison's brother in the after- 
noon to visit her. Bishop Fenwick testified 
upon oath that he found Miss Harrison in a 
state of derangement, her looks haggard, her 



CHAHLESTOWN. 



11 



expressions incoherent, while she lauglied and 
cried in the same moment ; that his one object 
in going for her was to talie her to the convent, 
clothe her properly, and send lier to her friends, 
presnmingthat she left because dissatisfied with 
her mode of treatment ; but when he proposed 
her return to her home, she begged and en- 
treated to bft allowed to remain. Upon her 
restoration to the convent, she declared that 
"she did not know what it all meant," and she 
begged the people w'ho called upon her not to 
refer any more to the circumstances of her 
brief absence, for she could not be responsible 
for what she then said or did. To Misg Alden, 
who in past times had heard her frequently say 
that she could never cease to be thankful 



enough for having been called to that happy 
state of life, and who now visited her, she ex- 
pressed the greatest horror at the step she had 
taken, and said that she would prefer death to 
leaving. And upon being examined in conrt^ 
on the trial of the rioters, she averred that had 
any one ever told her she should do what she 
had done, she would have thought it impossi- 
ble ; that nothing was omitted, in the conduct 
of the institution, that could contribute to her 
happiness or to that of the other inmates ; that 
her recollection of what took place after her 
flight was very indistinct, for she was bereft of 
reason; and she covered her face and burst into 
tears. 
The worst conjecture, one would have 







ESCAPE OF THE " MYSTEEIOrS LAPT " FEOM THE tn?SrLIVT5 COXTEXT OP KT. BEKEDICT.— " HER NERVOUS 
EXCITEMENT CUUIINATINO IN PEI.IRIU3I, SHE SLirPED OCT OP THE CONVENT." 



12 



CHAELESTOTVN. 



tlioiiglit, that, In uncbarity, could have' been 
put upon this affair, would have been that, 
never of very strong mind, and now worn out 
with the unceasing recurrence of her labors, 
she had suddenly imagined the life unbearable, 
and in a wild moment had escaped from it only 
to find herself grown unused to the world, and 
more unhappy there than over her old tasks in 
the convent. But that was truth beside the 
calumnies that Instantly sprang into being upon 
the foundation of this unfortunate occurrence. 
It was remembered, too, that another young 
woman had left Mount Benedict not long pre- 
viously, and the atrocious slanders upon the 
sisterhood which she scattered wherever she 
went were revived with added burden, and 
there was hardly any scandal possible to be in- 
vented but was repeated and believed, till the 
stately brick edifice on the hill was honestly re- 
garded far and near, by the bigoted and narrow- 
minded of the untaught population, as a den of 
wickedness and filth ; and a conspiracy for its 
suppression was hurriedly formed, not only in 
Cliarlestown, but throughout other towns and 
extending into other States. Matters probably 
were greatly hastened then by the appearance 
in one of tbe neighboring newspapers of a para- 
graph entitled "The Mysterious Lady," and 
containing the items of local eossip about Miss 
Harrison's escapade, magnified and exagge- 
rated into the flight of a nun brought back by 
force, and either murdered, secreted in the 
underground vaults, or sent away for some 
awful punishment in remoter regions ; and this 
was only the visible aid audible expression of 
what appears to have been in the minds of 
nearly all, if not in their mouths ; and the first 
manner in which the general feeling outcropped 
was by waylaying the convent-gardener and 
beating him within an inch of his life, wreak- 
ing in a vicarious way the vengeance that could 
not yet arrive at his employers. 

A few days after Miss Harrison's return to 
Mount Benedict, the Lady Superior, whom Dr. 
Thompson, a Chariest own physician, has men- 
tioned as "thoroughly educated, dignified in 
her person, and elegant in her manners, pure 
in her morals, of generous and magnanimous 
feelings, and of high religious principles," was 
rude y waited on by one of the Selectmen of the 
town — the s;ime whose kind iutentions respect- 
ing the farmhouse have been mentioned— and 
informed that the convent would be destroyed 
if the Mysterious Lady could not be seen. The 
Superior had already told this gentleman the 
state of Miss Harrison's health, and the inci- 
dents leading to her temporary aberration of 
mind, and she knew it was quite in his power 
to contradict any wrong impression abroad, and 
to qnell any uneasiness witi out troubling her 
lurther ; but, it being Sunday, she now ap- 
pointed Monday, the next day, for the five Se- 
lcc<men to be shown over the establishment, 
and included In her invitation two neighbors 
who had been insirumental in increasing the 
popular prejudice. On Monday the visitors 
came, and ferreted the house through from 
cellar to cupola, occupying three hours, look- 
ing even into the paint-boxes, searching every 
closet, opening every drawer, assisted by the 
Mysterious Lady, Miss Harrison, herself, in per- 
son. Tleir errand done, they declared them- 
selves satisfied that not only was there nothing 
to censure in the least, but, on the other hand, 
much to praise, and they adjourned to the house 



of one of their number to prepare a pronuncla- 
mento to that purpose for the morning papers. 
They had but little more than left tlie building, 
just before sunset, when a group of men 
gathered about the gates of the avenue, using 
impertinent language , but, upon the Superior's 
notifying the Selectmen, she was assured there 
was not the least prospect of the occurrence of 
anything disagreeable. It was shortly after 
nine in the evening when she became more 
seriously alarmed by a great noise on the Med- 
ford road, made by an advancing mob, with 
cries of " Down with the convent ! Down with 
the convent !" With much presence of mind, 
she instantly aroused the Community, telling 
them she feared they were in danger — the riot- 
ers on the road, meanwhile, constantly increas- 
ing in force with new arrivals, on foot and in 
wagons, from every quarter. After waking 
those that were asleep, she went into the se- 
cond story of the building, and, throwing up a 
window, asked the party of forty or ^fty 
gathered outside what they desired, adding 
that they were disturbing the slumbers of the 
pupils, some of whom were the children of 
their most respected fellow-citizens. They re- 
plied that they did not mean to hurt the chil- 
dren, but they must see the nun that had run 
away. The Superior went to fetch her, biit 
found that she had fainted with fright, and lay 
insensible in the arms of four of the Sisters. 
The Superior then returned to tell the people 
that this was the case ; she asserted to them 
that the establishment had that day been visited 
by the Selectmen, who had been pleased with 
all they saw, and would assure them of it, and 
that if they would call on the next day, at a 
suitable hour, they should have every satisfac- 
tion. They asked her if she were protected, 
and she answered, " Yes, by legions !" invok- 
ing the celestial guardians. But other parties 
having come to swell their numbers, they re- 
plied in indecent terms, calling her an old 
figurehead made of brass, telling her that she • 
was lying, and that they had one of the Select- 
men with them who had opened the gates to 
them. The Selectman then came forward, and 
advised the Superior to throw herself on his 
protection, but as he was the same Selectman 
whose officiousness had already produced much 
of the trouble, the Superior, after asking him 
if he had secured the attendance of any other 
members of the board, refused to trust her es- 
tablishment to his safe-keeping, telling him, if 
he wished to befriend her, first to disperse the 
mob. This he feebly attempted, deterring the 
rioters from firing the building, when they 
called for torches, by telling them that If lights 
were brought they would be recognized and 
detected— after which noble effort he returned 
.to his house, and valiantly went to bed. 

The mob then fired, a gun in the labyrinth 
under the willow-trees, possibly as a token of 
some^sort to their accomplices, and withdrew a 
little, wliile waiting for the fresh arrivals. At 
about eleven o'clock the fences were torn up 
and a bonfire kindled, which is believed to 
have been a concerted signal for the presence 
of all the conspirators, anu the bells being rung 
as for an alarm of fire, both in Charlestown 
and Boston, multitudes pressed to the spot. 
Several fire-engines also appeared — the Charles- 
town ones halting opposite the bonfire, and 
one from Boston passing up to the front of the 
mansion, where it was seized upon by the mob 



CHAELESTOWN. 



13 



and prevented from doing any service when 
needed, if bo inclined. Kumor still runs that 
at this point, when Boston would have sent 
other engines and further means to subdue the 
disturbances, the drawbridges were lifted, and 
it was found to be impossible to get them down. 
The arrival of the engine from Boston was, 
however, instantly followed by an assault upon 
the building in the shape of a shower of brick- 
bats and clubs against the windows, after which 
the bold assailants waited to see if any defense 
were to be made, or any resentment manifested 
to this attack, which Uiey knew might kill or 
maim many of the lielpless inmates. This brief 
pause allowed the Lady Superior opportunity to 
marshal lier little Hock, whom she had refused 
previously to allow to leave the building, lest 
that should be only betraying it to its destruc- 
tion, and under convoy of the terrified Sisters 
to secure their retreat down the garden, into 
the summer-house, and over the fence into the 
adjoining grounds, where they were safe till 
tliey could be collected in a friendly house : 
there had been sixty children to be taken care 
of, and of the nuns that night one was in the j 
last stages of pulmonary consumption, one was ! 
in convulsive fits, and Miss Harrison had been { 
wrought, by the agitation cf the evening, to a 
raving delirium. The Superior, having per- 
formed this duty, lingered herself, with the 
true spirit of a leader in such situation, open- 
ing the doors of every room and' looking into | 
every dormitory, calling every child by uame, 
to be suie that none were left behind, and 
then, last of all, descending to her own room 
to secure the valuables there, to^etlier with a 
thousand dollars belonging to the revenue of 
the institution ; but before the last of thn I 
children had left the building the varlets had ■ 
poured in, and as she herself fled from it they 
were but ten feet behind her. In a mo- 
ment afterward the house Mas filled with 
the mob, shouting, yelling, and blaspheming ; 
torches. snatched from the engines lighted the ! 
way for them, they ransacked every room, 
rifled every trunk, broke open every drawer, ! 
stole watclies, thrust the costly jewelry of the 
Spanish children into their pockets, split up i 
the piano-fortes, sliattered the splendid harps, 
and even made way with the altar ornaments 
presented by the good Archbishop of Bordeaux. 
Having satisaed tlieir curiosity and greed, they 
piled up the furniture, curtains, books, pic- 
tures, in the centre of the several rooms, and 
deliberately set fire to every heap, thi-ew in 
the altar vestments, the Bible and the cross, 
and, the act of virtue consummated, left the 
buUding in flames. .After this, the bishop's 
lodge experienced a similar fate, the farm- 
Louse belonging to the institute followed, and 
the grand demonstration of proper religious 
sentiment wound up with tearing open the 
tomb of the place, pillaging the sacred vessels 
there, stealing the coffin-plates, and scattering 
the ashes of the dead to the four winds. 

l?ot a hand was lifted to stay tliese abominar- 
ble proceedings, by any one of the vast multi- 
tude outside 5 the firemen, who declared fre- 
quently that they could prevent the flames if 
allowed, were liindered from acting — although 
their sincerity may be suspected from the fact 
that an engine returned to Boston decked with 
the flowers ;tolen from the altar; the magis- 
trates neither made any re nonstrance, nor 
read the riot-act, nor demanded help of neigh- 




LEGEND OF CHAKLESTOWif. 
KUINS OF THE UKSULINB CONVENT OF MT. BENEDICT. 

boring towns, nor asiied for the services of the 
marines at the Kavy Yard, nor made a single 
arrest during all the seven hours of the riot. 
And though the outside multitude, who took 
no part in the crime, were all Protestants, not 
one of them dared to protest against this out- 
rage, not only upon weakness and detenseless- 
ness, but upon civil liberty, and all remained 
paralyzed until the end, doubtful perhaps if 
there were enough disapprovers among them 
to be of any avail, and entirely forgetful that a 
stream from a single engine-hose would have 
dispersed the whole mob more quickly than a 
battery could have done. 

Meanwhile the nuns, escaping with difficulty, 
and with yet greater difficulty supporting the 
young consumptive, Sister Mary St. Henry, and 
getting her across the fence at the garden's 
foot, had found a kindly shelter, and were 
shortly afterward invited by old General Dear- 
born to his seat in Eoxburj', called Brinley 
Place, vhere they found once more a home, 
although, before they were fairly settled there, 
Mary St. Henry died, at the age of twenty. 
Though an invalid, this young woman had been 
able to give a lesson on the day of the destruc- 
tion of tile convent ; all that night she lay in a 
cold rigor, and eleven days afterward she was 
dead. Her funeral was one of unusual pomp ; 
every Catholic in tlie vicinity made an object of 
attending, half the citizens of Boston were 
organized into a special police through expect- 
ation of some requital, and so deeply roused 
were the feelings of the injured party, that it is 
probable nothing but tte most unremitting exer- 
tions of their clergy prevented severe retaliation. 
The matter, however, did not end here im- 
mediately. Loud expressions of disapprobation 
were heard from all portions of the State, and 
a self-constituted Committee, of the best names 
in Boston, including such as Robert C. Win- 
throp, William Appleton, Horace Mann, The- 
ophilns Parsons, and Thomas Motley, prepared 
at once to investigate the affair, and bring, if 



14 



CHAELESTOWN. 



'possible, the miscreants to justice. They ex- 
amined more than one hundred and forty per- 
sons, and, chiefly by their exertions, thirteen 
arrests were made, of which eight were of a 
capital nature. Tlie young woman who had 
scattered the atrocious slanders was visited, 
and she retracted everything but the assertions 
relative to the severe penances of the sick nun; 
but even on that point her word was discredited 
by means of other witnesses, the sisters by birth 
of Mary St. Henry ; it was proved that she had 
been a charity-student in the institute, desirous 
of taking the vail, admitted on probation for six 
months to discover if she had either capacity, 
sincerity, or strength of character, failing to dis- 
play which she was about to be dismissed, when 
she left secretly. Miss Aiden, a young lady 
who had taken the white vail at Mount Benedict, 
and afterward freely left it, testified that, upon 
living there two years, she became convinced 
that she had no vocation for an ascetic life, and 
made her feelings known to the Superior, who 
advised her accordingly, strongly as they were 
attached to each other, to depart if she could 
not be happy there, of which no one could judge 
but herself, and to her decision it should be 
left, for their rules allowed no one to remain 
except such as found their happiness there, 
and there only. "She told me," said Miss 
Alden, "that I was at liberty to go when 1 
pleased, and should be provided with every- 
thing requisite for my departure — which was 
done two years after, having remained that 
length of time merely from personal attach- 
ment to the Lady Superior." And it was 
equally evident that others desiring to do 
so had been allowed to separate themselves 
from the Community in the same manner. 
The charge of inhumanity to the sick was also 
sifted, and found amounting to nothing; the 
child with the scarlet-fever having been sent 
home upon the first symptom of the disease, to 
prevent the intection's reaching the remaming 
children. And to an assertion in relation to 
secret vaults beneath the building, the mason, 
one Peter Murphy, who laid the foundations, 
declared, under his own signature, that nothing 
of the kind existed. Although unanimously 
opposed to the ftoman Catholic forms of re- 
ligion, the Committee published a most mag- 
nanimous report of their investigation ; and 
finally a man by the name of Buzxell was 
brought to trial as a ringleader in the late 
atrocity. He received, however, a very singu- 
lar trial ; one of the jurymen was several times 



seen to be asleep ; and though It was proved to 
be he that had beaten the convent-gardener, 
that had been seen actively encouraging the 
rioters, breaking the doors, bringing tar-barrels 
and firing them, and though on the retirement 
of the jury they stood seven to five tor convic- 
tion, on the way from their room to the court- 
room they became unanimous for acquittal. 
The only person ever punished for complicity in 
the afl'air, was a mere boy, convicted on very 
insuflicient evidence, but for whom it waa 
probably supposed the penalty would be made 
right ; he M-as sentenced to imprisonment for 
life, his mother died of a broken heart, and 
finally he was pardoned out, ruined, and old 
before his time. There all proceedings ended. 
The nuns were invited to establish themselves 
at Newport, in the land where Roger Williams 
made religious toleration a fact, but the propo- 
sition was declined, partly perhaps because the 
attack showed where their work was needed, 
and partly in tlie belief that Massachusetts 
would render justice, inasmuch as having al- 
ways paid for protection, when then the protec- 
tion was withheld the State became responsible 
foi all damages. This responsibility has never 
been met. Repayment has been constantly 
urged by all denominations ; Theodore Parker 
made himself especially prominent in the mat- 
ter ; but, owing to a mistaken judgment of what 
the popular opinion may be, no Legislature has 
yet been found with sufQcient courage to make 
an appropriation to reimburse the Convent for 
its losses, and in refusing this demand for pay- 
ment the State has virtually repeated the out- 
rage year by year. 

Perhaps no more scathing commentary on the 
whole matter will ever be made tlian that to be 
found in the following exact copy : 

"November 26, 1834. 

"Eeceived of Bishop Fenwick, the sum of 
seventy-nine dollars and twenty cents, the same 
being taxes assessed by the Assessors of the 
town of Charlestown, upon the laud and build- 
ings of the late Convent of Mount Benedict, for 
the year 1834, and wliich were this day de- 
manded by Solomon Hovey, Jr., Collector, 
agreeably to instructions received by 1dm from 
the Assessors, to that efl'ect, although said 
buildings had been destroyed by a mob in Au- 
gust last. 

"$79.20. (Signed) 

" Solomon HoviiT, Jr., Collector.'* 



SALEI. 



When the traveler loses eight of Charles- 
town, with its trim but incongruous monu- 
ments, his train is passing out on ttie meadows 
clotted with haycocks and alive with every tint 
of red and russet, and presently is skirting the 
shores of Swampscot and Lynn. Here, per- 
haps, he glances up at the High Rock com- 
manding sight of the dim line of the Beverley 
beaches, of the Cape Ann Shadows, the jagged 
coast of Marbleliead, the long sweep of the 
Swampscot sands, the wild cliffs of Nahant, 
and the immense horizon of the bay beyond — 
a spot where Moll Pitcher for so many years 
performed her mysteries ; and twenty minutes 
afterward the train is running into a region 
where witch and warlock, once holding revel, 
still haunt every inch of the ground. This re- 
gion, whose centre is known as the town of 
Salem, is very lovely in the river-banks and 
villas of its outskirts. For the town itself, 
slight marks remain of the old Puritan domina^ 
tion, and its days of East Indian glory and 
spicy argosies are over. Reminiscences of that 
glory, however, continue to give caste in 
the place, and every lady in Salem has a 
cachemire shawl, it is said, or else has no 
passport to society ; and great warehouses 
and great fortunes remain to tell of the 
state that has passed away. Among the 
smaller towns along the coast, Salem is still the 
most wealthy, and is therefore the target for 
much ill-nature on the part of her poorer 
neighbors. Nothing equals the contempt which 
a Lynn man feels for a citizen of Salem, unless 
it is the contempt ■« hich a Gloucester man feels, 
or that which a Salem man not only feels but 
manifests, for both of the others and the rest of 
creation besides. In Mavblehead this hostility 
reaches more open expression, and the mutual 
sentiments of both populations are uttered by 
the urchins there when they cry : " Here 
comes a Salem boy — let's rock him round the 
corner !" Nevertheless, Salem contrives to 
creep along, to found her museum, to become 
headquarters for the Essex Institute, and to 
make herself, in ever so slight a measure, a 
centre of culture and advance. Lately the 
Scientific Societies met there, and were — un- 
dreamed-of thing — invited home to dinner : 
In a town where, if necessity obliges you to 
call upon a man at his club, he comes out and 



shuts the door behind him, keeping a grasp 
upon the handle as an intimation of the brevity 
of your visit — where Choate and Webster, 
pleading in court, have picked up a luncheon, 
at noontide, in hotel or eating-house, as best 
they might, and where Hawthorne all but 
starved. Salem is conspicuous among New 
England towns for the beauty of its women ; a 
plain face would be an anomaly there, and the 
well-fed blood of wealthy generations is told 
by the bloomy skins and abundmt tresses, the 
expression of sweetness and dignity, the soft 
eyes and fine features, of the daughters of the 
place. The town still preserves a few relics of 
its memorable past ; the House of the Seven 
Gables was standing there a little while ago, 
together with the Townsend-Bishop house, 
famous for its share in the old witchcraft trans- 
actions, and the Corwin house, at the corner of 
North and Essex streets, where the Grand Jury 
sat upon those transactions. There are some 
handsome churches and public buildings of 
more modern date, and a stone Court-house, 
together with a fine Registry of Deeds. There 
is an interest attaching to this latter structure, 
not altogether archaeological though concern- 
ing itself with antiquities, but an interest in 
one of the darkest problems ever presented by 
human nature ; for here are kept such docu- 
ments as have been preserved from the witch- 
craft days, and among them the death-warrant 
of Bridget Bishop. Very few indeed are these 
papers ; for, when the frenzy of the period 
began to subside, those "Salem Gentlemen" 
who petitioned the Government to grant no re- 
prieve to Rebecca Nurse, a woman who had lived 
nearly eighty years of a saintly life, were over- 
taken by remorse and shame, and hastened to 
do away with all remembrance of their recent ac- 
tion, exhibiting a better sense of the fitness of 
things than their descendants do who do-day 
display in a sealed vial a dozen bent and verdi- 
grised and rusty pins purporting to be the 
identical ones with which their forefathers 
plagued the witches ; albeit, it is said, the 
tashion of these pins was not known at the 
time when those poor wretches were tor- 
mented. Indeed to the stranger in the town 
of Salem this is the one thought ; he looks at 
these people whom he meets upon the street, 
and they become to him curious subjects of 



16 



SALEM. 



conjecture as he reflects that intermarriage has 
obliterated the ancient feud and rancor, and 
wonders in what way it is that in these indi- 
viduals tlie blood of afliicted, persecutor, and 
accused, together, accommodates itself. One 
would looli for the birth of strong character- 
istics here, possibly for terrible developments, 
out of the opposition of such material ; but 
nothing notable ever happens in the tranquil 
town, and not a ripple of distinction brealis its 
history since those first dreadful days, unless 
we recall the vanished figure of Hawthorne 
walliing all his life long In the shadow of that 
old witch-prosecuting ancestor, the Magistrate. 
But much inheritance of a thing dies with the 
memory of it, and when the scales dropped 
from the eyes of the persecutors of 1692, and 
they saw themselves the shedders of innocent 
blood, they destroyed all records that coulfj he 
found, reseated the church so that relatives of 
the murderer and of the murdered sang their 
hymns side by side from the same book, and 
since those who had borne the stain of the 
8cafi"old in their family were not liliely to make 
it subject of conversation, those wlio inflicted 
that stain were glad to let it be forgotten ; and 
it came to pass that, when the historian sought 
for it, he found less tradition existing rela- 
tive to the occurrences of that dark and 
bloody period than of times of quadruple the 
antiquity. It reached him, though, from all 
unimagined avenues, from church-records, from 
registries of wills and deeds, from family pa- 
pers, and we now have it in suflicient complete- 
ness to make us detest, if not the people, at 
least the influences that made the people 
actors in that tragedy. 

Like most things of magnitude, the Salem 
Witchcraft had its beginnings in small things — 
in so small a thing, indeed, as a circle of young 
girls meeting together, on winter evenings, at 
each other's houses, to practice palmistry and 
8uch sleight-of-hand as parlor-magic had then 
attained. Perhaps it was as remarkable a 
thing as any in the whole occurrences that 
Buch meetings were countenanced at all in 
that place of the Puritan, and more remark- 
able still, that no connection was suspected 
between these meetings and the subsequent 
antics. These young girls were ten in number ; 
three of them were servants, and two of these 
are believed to have acted from malicious 
motives against the families where they were 
employed, one* of them afterward admitting 
that she did so ; and Mary Warren's guilt, as 
capital witness securing the execution of seven 
Innocent persons, being — unless we accept the 
hypothesis of spiritualism — as evident as it is 
black and damning. In addition to these there 
were the negro-slaves of Mr. Parris, the min- 
ister, in whose household all the first disturb- 
ances made their appearance, Tituba and her 
husband. 

It is worthy of remark, as the historian 
urges, that Elizabeth Parris — a child of only 
nine years, but of extraordinary precocity, the 
daughter of the minister, himself the foremost 
fomenter and agitator of the troubles — was 
early removed by him from the scene, and 
placed under shelter at safe distance. Of tlie 
remainder, the most prominent were Abigail 
Williams, nged eleven, a niece of the minis- 
ter's, and resident in his family ; Ann Putnam, 
aged twelve ; Betty Hubbard and Mary Walcot, 
both aged seventeen ; and Mercy Lewie, of the 



same age, a servant in the family of Ann Put- 
nam's mother ; Mrs. Ann Putnam, aged thirty, 
who afterward became as prominent as any in 
the matter of alflictions. There were a Mrs. 
Pope and a Mrs. Bibber, who joined the circle ; 
but the one was only hysterical, and the latter 
was detected in a trick, and their connection 
with the phenomena was brief. It is not un- 
reasonable to suppose that Tituba was at the 
root of the whole business. Brought by Mr. 
Parris, who had formerly been a merchant, from 
the West Indies, and still but halt-civilized, she 
was full of her wild Obeah superstitions and 
incantations, in which she had without doubt 
interested the two children in her master's 
family, Elizabeth Parris and Abigail Williams. 
Probably they invited Ann Putiiam, a child of 
nearly the same age as themselves, to witness 
what they found so entertaining •, and she, 
confiding in her mother's servant, Mercy Lewis, 
an ignorant girl of seventeen, Mercy in turn 
interested her own companions in the matter. 
Sitting over the winter fires, after growing 
tired of their exercises in magic, it is likely 
that they rehearsed to each other all the mar- 
velous tales of the primeval settlements, stories 
full of sheeted ghosts, with wild hints of the 
Indian goblin Hobbomocko, till they shuddered 
and laughed at the shuddering, and their ter- 
rified imaginations and excited nerves were 
ready for something beyond. Perfecting them- 
selves in all they could discover of legerdemain, 
taught by Tituba the secret of a species of vol- 
untary cataleptic fit, and improving on her 
teachings by means of their own superior in- 
telligence, before the winter was over they 
had become adepts in their arts, and were 
ready for exhibition. It is likely that at first 
their object was merely to display their skill, 
to make amusement and arouse wonder, and, 
possibly, admiration, in their beholders, who 
singularly failed to perceive that it was a con- 
certed thing among them. Perhaps, too, they 
were somewhat emulous of the lame of the 
Godwin children, whose exploits had lately 
been on every tongue. When the crowds, 
who afterward flocked to see those whom min- 
isters and doctors had pronounced bewitched, 
witnessed their appalling condition, they were 
overwhelmed with horror ; fof, " whatever 
opinion may be formed," says Mr. Upham, "of 
the moral or mental condition of tlie afflicted 
children, as to their sanity and responsibility, 
there can be no doubt that they were great 
actors. In mere jugglery and sleight-of-hand, 
they bear no mean comparison with tlie workers 
of wonders, in that line, of our own day. Long 
practice had given them complete control over 
their countenances, intonations of voice, and 
the entire muscular and nervous org nization 
of their bodies ; so that they could at will, and 
on the instant, go into fits and convulsions ; 
swoon and fall to the floor ; put their frames 
into strange contortions ; bring the blood to 
the face and send it back again. They could 
be deadly pale at one moment, at the next 
flushed ; their hands would be clinched and 
held together as with a vice ; their limbs stiff 
and rigid or wholly relaxed ; their teeth would 
be set, they would go through the paroxysms 
of choking and strangulation, and gasp for 
breath, bringing froth and blood from the 
mouth ; they would utter all sorts of screams 
in unearthly tones ; their eyes remain fixed, 
sometimes bereft of all light and expression, 



gALEM. 



17 




"THE EEV, GEOBGE BUKEOUGHS WAS ACCUSED OP ■WITCHCRAFT ON THE EVIDENCE OF FEATS OF STKENGT:!, 
TRIED, HUNG, AND BURIED BENEATH THE GALLOWS." 



cold and stony, and sometimes kindled into 
flames of passion ; they would pass into the 
state of somnambulism, without aim or con- 
scious direction in their movements, looking 
at some point where was no apparent object of 
vision, with a wild, unmeaning glare. There 
are some indications that they had acquired 
the art of ventriloquism ; or they so wrought 
upon the imaginations of the beholders that 
the sounds of the motions and voices of invisi- 
ble beings were believed to be heard. They 
would start, tremble, and be pallid before ap- 
paritions seen, of course, only by themselves ; 
but their acting was so perfect that all pre- 
sent thought they saw them, too. They would 
address and hold colloquy with spectres and 



ghosts, and the responses of the unseen beings 
would be auf'ible to the fancy of the bewildered 
crowd. They would follow with their eyes the 
airy visions so that others imagined they also 
beheld them." 

M". Upham calls this a high dramatic achieve- 
ment ; but he goes on to state that the Attor- 
ney-General, a barrister fresh from the Inns of 
Court at London, was often present, together 
with many others who had seen the world, and 
were competent to detect trickery ; and it is, 
aficr all, difficult to believe that this parcel of 
rude girls could have acquired so much dex- 
terity, and that no diseased condiMoa of mind 
and nerve assisted them, and that the fit-, 
which were at first voluntary, did not at last 



18 



SALEM. 



take control of them and all their powers. 
Notwithstanding this doubt, it is plain that 
their magic came in on such occasions as the 
pin-pricking ; as, for instance, when ^ne of 
them, not wishing to reply, had a pin appa- 
rently run through both her upper and lower 
lip, and no Avound or festering following. On 
such occasions, loo, as that when they were 
found with their arms tied, and hung upon a 
hook, or their wrists bound fast with a cord, 
after the manner of the Davenport Brothers of 
to-day ; as that, when an iron spindle, missing 
for some time from a house in the village, was 
suddenly snatched out of the air from the hand 
of an apparition ; or that, when one of them 
being afflicted by a spectre in a white sheet, in- 
visible to other than herself, caught and tore 
the corner of the sheet, and showed the real 
cloth in h.er hand to the spectators, who received 
it undoubtingly. Their catalepsy, though, or 
whatever it may be called, was of use to them 
throughout — whether they chewed soap till 
they foamed at the mouth, and expertly twisted 
their supple bodies into long-practiced contor- 
tions, or whether what was feigned at first 
grew real afterward, and they were seized by 
the flame they had kindled, and became de- 
mented by the contagious delirium. It is well 
understood that the Shakers of the present 
day are capable of producing similar condi- 
tions — fits, distortions, trances in which visions 
are imagined to be seen ; and something of 
the same sort is frequent in the camp-meeting 
revivals, w'hile shrieking hysterics are now 
known to be as voluntary as winking ; and it 
has even been discovered that fixing the eyes 
and the attention upon a bright spot at a short 
distance away will induce a state of coma. 
Whether they had learned the possibility of 
such things, or merely simulated them, it is 
almost impossible to believe that these girls, 
in the depth of depravity to which they de- 
scended, were not victims of a temporary in- 
sanity. Tlieir ready wit and make-shift would 
lend a color to this supposition, as being only 
the cunning of the insane, if there had not 
been so much method in tneir madness, and 
there were not too much evidence of a direct- 
ing hand behind them. 

Mr. Upham thinks that they became intoxi- 
cated with the terrible success of their impos- 
ture, and having sewed the wind, were swept 
away by the whirlwind ; they appeared, he 
says, as the prosecutors of every poor creature 
that was tried, to such degree that their wick- 
edness seems to transcend the capabilities of 
human ciime ; but he goes on to remark that 
" there is, perhaps, a slumbering element in 
the heart of man that sleeps forever in the 
bosom of the innocent and good, and requires 
the perpetration of a great sin to wake it into 
action ; but which, when once aroused, impels 
the transgressor onward with increasing mo- 
mentum, as tlie descending ball is accelerated 
in its course. It may be that crime begets an 
appetite for crime, which, like all other appe- 
tites, is not quieted, but inflamed by grati- 
fication." 

A large part of the diflBculty in determining the 
truth ab' ut these girls may vanish if we recall 
the declaration of the British judge, a few years 
since, upon the case of Constance Kent, con- 
fessing the murder of her little half-brother, 
where he remarked it to be a fact that there 
wasapoint in the existence of the young, when, 



just coming to the ftili sense of life, and occu- 
pied with that, and generally with a nervous 
system so delicately organized as easily to be 
mrown out of balance, they seem to be desti' 
tute of all natural feeling, of all moral percep- 
tion, and pliant to any wickedness. These young- 
girls of Salem Village, some of greater pre- 
cocity than others, were probably all of them 
within the scope of this declaration, and at an 
age when they needed careful shielding and 
observation, instead of being left, as they were, 
to the companionship of servants — servants 
whose duller minds and lower breeding re- 
duced all difl'erence of age to nothing •. and the 
written and signed confession of their ring- 
leader still remains to render one very cautious 
in assigning the explanation of their misdeeds 
to any preternatural or even abnormal cause. 
It is known, at any rate, that they were several 
times discovered in deception ; once, on being 
reproved for it, they boldly answered that they 
must have a little sport ; on another time, cne 
of them was plainly seen to be practicing a trick 
with pins ; and, again, one of them crjing out 
that she was being stabbed with a knife, a 
broken piece of a knife was found upon her, but 
a young man in the audience immediately de- 
clared that, on the day before, he had broken 
his knife, this afflicted person being present, 
and thrown the broken part away^ and he pro- 
duced the haft and remaining portion of the 
blade to prove it, and though the girl was repri- 
manded, she was used, just the same, for wit- 
ness in other cases. 

The state of feeling in the Colonies and else- 
where could not have been more propitious to 
their undertaking than it was at the time when 
they opened their drama. Cotton Mather, 
whose mind was a seething caldron of supersti- 
tions, had just published the account of the 
afllicted Goodwin children ; Goody Morse was 
living in her own house at Newbury, under 
sentence of death, sentence pronounced in 
Boston, it having been found impossible hith- 
erto to convict a person for witchcraft in Essex 
County ; and Margaret Jones, and Mistress 
Anne Hibbins, a sister of Governor Bellingham 
and one of the figures of the '• Scarlet Letter," 
had, not long before, been hung for practicing 
the black art ; they were the free-thinkers of 
that day who doubted the verily of witchcraft — 
Addison believed in it, Edmund Fairfax, tlie 
translator of Tasso, believed in it. Sir Thomas 
Browne gave in court his testimony in behalf of 
its reality ; Blackstone, the fountain of law, 
asserted that to deny the existence ot witehcratt 
was 10 contradict the word of God ; King James 
had written diatribes on witclies and had perse- 
cuted them ; Queen Elizabeth had persecuted 
them ; William Penni'Siad presided at the trial 
of two women for witchcraft ; thirty years after 
the executions in Salem, Dr. Watts expressed 
his persuasion that there was much agency of 
the devU and some real witches in that aflair ; 
and so deeply rooted and long in dying was the 
superstition, that in 1766 a Presbyterian synod 
in Scotland denounced, as a national sin, the 
repeal of the penal laws against witchcraft; in 
1808 women were abused for witches Dy a 
vhole population within sixty miles of London, 
and so lutely as the beginning of this century 
Father Altizzo was imprisoned at Rome for 
sorcery, and there were prosecutions for witch- 
craft in some of the interior districtsof our own 
Southern States. In the midst of rfuch universal 



SALEM. 



19 



darkness, the people of Salem were not behind 
the spirit of tlieir age when fancying that their 
village had become tiie battle-ground of Anti- 
chi'ist ; and possibly they recovered sooner 
from their delusion than other communities of 
less sturdy aud self-asserting habits of thought 
might have done. The village, too, presented 
an excellent field of operation, for it had for 
many years been torn with dipsensions ; there 
had been violent jealousies, wrangles and law- 
suits over the acquisition of large property, 
through industry and enterprise, by peoi)le 
once in less prosperous circumstances, as for 
example, the Nurses, and quarrels with the 
" Topsfield Men," connections of the Nurses, in 
relation to boundaries, resulting in fisticuff en- 
counters aud lasting enmities. There had, 
moreover, been trouble in the parish in relation 
to the impossibility oi procuring a minister who 
should please all parties, Mr. Bayley, Mr. Bur- 
roughs and Mr. Deodat Lawson having been 
obliged to leave, owing to the hostilities, and 
Mr. Sam. Parris being settled in their place. 
Mr. Parris, among several singular qualities,' 
seems to have been almost destitute of syra- 
patliy — he once told some men whose mother's 
execution h6 had been instrumental in nrocur- 
ing, that while they thought her innocent and 
he thought her guilty, the matter between them 
was merely 'a difle euce of opinion; he was 
possessed of great talent, and of an inordinate 
ambiiion ; passionately fond of power, and con- 
stantly stirring up scenes that might lead to it, 
during the whole time of his career he kept the 
parish in a broil ; he had at last grown so un- 
popular, that some bold stroke became necessary 
in order to re^iain lost ground, and wlien the 
children in his family commenced their per- 
formances, it is thought that he saw his ad- 
vantage, and used it, to the pulling down of 
those who opposed him, and the setting-up of 
the standard of the Church, in his person, over 
all other authority. Probably, as Cotton Mather 
did, he aspired to be the chief champion ot 
Christianity, and therefore the more exceed- 
ingly he could inflame the people, and then 
the more etl'ectnaUy quench the flame, the 
greater glory must redound to him and his 
ministry ; and it is poi-sible that neither he nor 
the " afflicted children " had originally any idea 
of the lengtl s to which the thing would go; but 
once committed, there was no retreat. 

When now the girls began to exhibit their 
new accomplishments at home, their frightened 
parents gave them medicine ; of course this 
did not modify their symptoms, and presently 
the physician was summoned. Finding that 
none of his appliances changed their condition, 
Dr. Griggs took reluge in a common saying of 
the time, which had sheltered the ignorance of 
many another doctor, and declared that an evil 
hand had been laid upon them. Then Mr. 
Parris scented his prey in an instant ; he kept 
the children in an agitation, noised the aflair 
abroad till it became the talk of town and 
countryside, and the neighbors ran to see the 
convulsions of the afflicted, shivered with awe 
when the Sabbath meetings were disturbed by 
their outbursts, believed they saw the yellow- 
bird that Ann Putnam saw " sitting on the min- 
ister's hat as it hangs on the pin in the pulpit ;" 
the families of the various afllicted ones fasted 
and prayed, and finally Mr. PaiTis called a con- 
vocation of the ministers to witness the i)ro- 
ceedings of these crazy children, half diseased, 



half evil. Upon this the children brought out 
all the scenes in their repertory at once, and 
the ministers were astounded ; always ready 
for combats with Satan, here they had him on 
open ground ; they appointed a day of exhortar 
tion over the afflicted, and increased the excite- 
ment of the people to lury, so that nothing was 
thought of but the sufferings of tliese victims of 
the wrath of the Evil One, sufferings whose 
reality no one disbelieved ; all business became 
suspended, all labor was lelt, and the whole 
community was in a frenzy of fanaticism. A few 
individuals did mt join the outcry: Martha 
Corey did not believe there were any witches — 
presently she was accused for one and hung ; 
the Nurses and Cloyses and Joseph Putnam ob- 
jected to the minister's allowing the children of 
his family to disturb the meeting without so 
much as a rebuke, and withdrew from their 
attendance at the church — Rebecca Nurse was 
hung, Sarah Cloyse was imprisoned, and Joseph 
Putnam escaped only by arming every member 
of his family and keeping a horse under saddle 
night and day for six months, determined, if the 
marshal came for him with a small posse, to re- 
sist, but if with an overwhelming force, to fly, 
choosing rather the mercies of the savage 
heathen of the forest than the barbarities of 
these frantic Chn.-tians. 

It is a common error to suppose that the 
three learned professions lead the people in 
point of intelligence. On the contrary, trained 
in grooves not easy to leave, they remain as 
they were in the beginning, and almost all ad- 
vance comes from the outside. This was never 
better exemplified than in the Witchcraft delu- 
sion. If the piiysicians then had possessed 
either acuteness, skill, or candor, they would 
have checked the girls in their first spasms ; if 
the ministers had been what they should have 
been ere daring to undertake the cure of souls, 
instead of lending countenance to their preten- 
sions and praying over the girls, they would 
have punished them and made them fear the 
consequences of their manoeuvres ; if the law- 
yers had exercised any quality which a lawyer 
should possess, they would have sifted their 
testimony till it blew away in the wind, and 
would have utterly cast out the evidence of 
spectres, instead of greedily receiving it and 
hounding on the poor wretches to their death. 
When justices, deacons, doctors and gentry 
hurried to wonder over and sympathize with 
the young impostors, when their leaders came 
to be mad, it is no marvel that the people lost 
their head and followed after. In the faith 
tliat the girls were bewitc.ied, and that Satan 
acted only through human agencies, they 
clamored to know who it was that had be- 
witched them ; and thus beset, the girls, either 
at random or because there was no one to be- 
friend her, or at Mr. Parris's half-hinted sugges- 
tion, timidly pronounced a name. "Good," 
they said, '• Good " — cheating their consciences, 
perhaps, by making it only a surname ; they 
had no such timidity by-and-by ; and Sarah 
Good was consequently apprehended. When 
she was examined, two others had been named, 
arrested, and were examined with her. 

Sarah Good was a poor creature — homeless, 
destitute, deserted by her husband, with a 
family of children to support by odds and ends 
of work, by begging from door to door, and 
scraping together in any way what little she 
could. Doubtless she was a nuisance in the 



SALEM. 



neighborhood, as most impecunious and shift- 
less people are, and her reputation was not 
satisfactory. Her fate was certain from the 
onset. The people — who were full of horror 
and of pity for the tortured girls; who had 
been told by the phjsiclans that they were be- 
witched ; who had seen the ministers oracularly 
confirm this statement; who had heard Mr. 
Parris make it the subject of his vehement dis- 
courses Sunday after Sunday, while the distem- 
per of the girls alarmed the congregation ; who 
had lately done notidng but look for the guilty 
author of this diabolism, drew a breath of re- 
lief wlien at last the witch was named ; so plau- 
sible a person, a vagrant and friendless ; and it 
must be admitte'l that Sarah Good and Mrs. 
Osburne — an elderly person, sometimes bed- 
ridden, sometimes distracted, who absented 
herself from meeting — and the slave Tituba, 
were the best possible selections that the cun- 
ning hussies could have made ; and the people 
were satisfied. Mrs. Osburne died in prison 
nine months afterward ; Tituba confessed — as 
she sub equently averred, under stress of beat- 
ings from Mr. Parris — and, lying in jail a year 
and a month, wa- finally sold for her fees ; but 
Sarah Good drank her cup, bitter all her life 
long, to the bitter dregs. The meeting-house 
was thronged at her examination ; she was 
placed on a platform in full sight of all there ; 
Mr. Parris had excited every one with his im- 
passioned opening prajer ; the array of magis- 
trates, marshal and constable were enough to 
strike awe into her soul at any time, much 
more when her life was at stake. Acquainted 
with want, with sorrow and obloquy, her heart 
had been hardened, and she gave back no mild 
answers to ttie catechising. The justices as- 
sumed lier guilt to be already established, en- 
deavored to make her involve herself, gave 
leading questions to the witnesses, allowed all 
manner of abominable interruptions, and brow- 
beat and abused her. When the afiiicted chil- 
dren were introduced, at a glance of her eye 
they straightway fainted and went into spasms, 
cried out that ihey were pinched and pricked 
and throttled, and fell stiflf as the dead. Upon 
being taken to her and touched by her, the 
color returned to their faces, their limbs re- 
laxed, they immediately became calm and well ; 
so that it seemed to be demonstrated before the 
eyes of the credulous audience that the malign 
miasm had been received back again into the 
wttch. 

She herself could not tell what to make 
of it, and never doubted the fact that the girls 
suflTered as they seemed to do ; she only de- 
clared that it was not she that caused it, and 
must be the others — which simple exclamation 
the justices used as a confession of her own 
guilt, and accusation and evidence against the 
others. " What is it that you say," asked Ha- 
thorne, "when you go muttering away from 
persons' houses ?" " If I must tell, I will tell," 
slie answers. " Do tell us, then," he urges. 
*' If I must tell, I will tell : it is the Command- 
ments. I may say my Commandments, I hope." 
"What Commandment is it?" Poor Sarah 
Good could not for the life of her remember a 
Commandment. "If I must tell you, I will 
tell," she ays then — " it is a psalm ;" and after 
a time she murmurs some fragment that she 
has succeeded in recalling. Before long her 
husband was brought In to testify against her. 
She was sent to prison — thrice leaping off her 



horse, railing against the magistrates, and 
essaying to take her own hfe — and afterward 
loaded down with iron fetters and with cords, 
since it was supposed a witch needed double 
fastenings, till led out, iour months later, to 
her execution. Meanwhile her child, five years 
old, was apprehended for a witch ; the marks 
of her little teeth were shown on Ann Putnam's 
arm ; Mercy Lewis and the others produced 
pins with which she had pricked them ; she 
was committed to prison and loaded with chains 
like her mother. Outraged, oppressed, and 
feeling there was no justice in the world unless 
the Powers that ride it made her word true, 
when, upon the scaflTold, the cruel minister, 
Nicholas Noyes, told Sarah Good she was a 
witch, and she knew she was a witch, she 
turned upon him and cried, " You are a liar ! 
and God shall give you blood to drink !" 
Twenty-five years afterward, and unrepenting, 
Nicholas Noyes l ied of an internal hemorrliage, 
the vital torrent pouring from his mouth and 
strangling him with his own blood. 

After the first three witches had been pro- 
claimed, the business began in earnest, and the 
girls " cried out upon " enough to keep the 
magistrates' hands full ; consternation and ter- 
ror ran like wildfire through the community, 
which was unlettered and ignorant to a large 
degree, the learning of the fathers having died 
witli them, and the schools not being yet estab- 
lislied ; presently everybody was either accused 
or accusing, there was a wiich in every house, 
the only safety for any was in suspecting 
a neighbor. If one expressed doubt of 
the atHicted children, he was marked from 
that moment. The Rev. Francis Dane sus- 
pected them ; his family were cried out 
upon, two of his children and many of his 
grandchildren being iiuprisonerl, and some 
sentenced to death. The Kev. John Higginson 
— of whom it was said, "liis very presence 
puts vice out of countenance, his conversation 
is a glimpse of heaven " — disbelieved in them ; 
his daughter Anna was committed a£ a witch. 
Husbai ds were made to criminate their wives, 
children, their parents ; when one of the ac- 
cusing girls fell away, she was herself accused, 
but knowing what to do, was saved by a con- 
fession of impossibilities. Anything was taken 
for evidence, the nightmares of this one, the 
drunken fantasies of that, the hysterics of the 
other, and any careless gossip that never 
should have been uttered at all. If a prisoner 
dared use any self-vindication, the vanity and 
anger of the magistrates were kindled against 
that one in especial. Hundreds were under 
arrest ; hundreds confessed to what they never 
did, as the only means to save their lives, 
though afterward frequently retracting their 
confessions and going cheerfully to death ; 
the prisons were full, and executions be- 
gan. The accusations of the afllicted girls 
mounted by degrees from simple witchcraft 
and writing in the Black Man's book, with the 
familiar of a yellow-bird suckling the fingers, 
to that of a baptism and sacrament of blood 
administered by the devil himself, and finally 
to that of fell and terrible murders. Their 
narratives were all of the same character, their 
imaginations filthy and limited in flight, and 
the only assertions in the wliole of their rodo- 
montade of any brilliance was Tituba's reply as 
to how they went to their place of meeting. " We 
ride upon sticks, and are there prestsuly,''^ aod 



SALEM. 



21 



the description of Mr. Burronghs's trumpet- 
stone to convene his witches — "a sound tliat 
reached over the country far andwirle. sending 
its blasts to Andover, and wakening its echoes 
along the Merrimack to Cape Ann and the ut- 
termost settlements everywhere." Kindness 
had no effect upon the girls ; when Mrs. Proc- 
ter—three of whose children their representa- 
tions had cast into prison, and whom they had 
torn away from her home, leaving her forlorn 
"little maid" of four years old to come out 
and scan the passers-by, In hopes each one 
might be her father or her mother, her brother 
or lier sister come back — when Mrs. Procter 
mildly said to one of them, " Dear child, it is 
not so," and solemnly added, " There is an- 
other judgment, dear child," they redoubleti 
their convulsions, and grew so outrageous that 
John Procter, protecting his wife from their 
insults, was himself accused and hung. The 
prisoners, meanwhile, were crowded in such 
noisome dungeons, that many died and many 
lost their reas^^n ; some also were tortured to 
procure confession — feet and head bound to- 
gether till the blood poured from eyes and 
nose. 

The accusations were by no means con- 
fined to Salem ; Andover, Beverly, Boston, 
were ransacked to fill them — the girls had 
tasted blood and were pitiless. A Mrs. Easty 
was taken from the old Crowningshield Farm 
in Topsfield (now owned by Mr. Thomas W. 
Pierce 1, and brouglit to court; she was a wo- 
man of station and character ; even the magis- 
trates were affected by her mien ; and though 
Ann Putnam and others cried, '• Oh, Goody 
Easty, Goody Easty, you are the woman, you 
are the woman !" slie was discharged, having 
endured several weeks' confinement ; but upon 
tliat there arose such an uproar among the 
girls, such fresh fits and tormentings, that, 
after havmg enjoyed her home for only two 
days, she was again arrested by the brutal Mar- 
shal Herrick, and presently hung. But even 
in her last hour this noble woman sent to the 
Governor a petition in behalf of her fellow- 
prisoners, yet asking no favor for herself. Mr. 
Upham describes a scene at the trial of Sarah 
Cloyse, taken every incident from the record, 
which perfectly illustrates the callousness of 
these girls. 

" Then Sarah Cloyse asked for water, and sat 
down, as one seized with a dying fainting- 
fit ; and several of the afflicted fell into fits, 
and some of them cried out, ' Oh, her spirit 
has gone to prison to her sister Nurse !' 

" The audacious lying of the witnesses ; the 
horrid monstrousness of their charges against 
Sarah Cloyse, of having bitten the flesh of the 
Indian brute, and drank herself and distributed 
to others as deacon, at an infernal sacrament, 
the blood of the wicked creatures making these 
foul and devilish declarations, known by her to 
be utterly and wickedly false ; and the fact 
that they were believed by the deputy, the 
council, and the assembly, were more than she 
could bear. Her soul sickened at such unim- 
aginable depravity and wrong ; her nervous 
system gave way ; she fainted and sank to the 
floor. The manner in which the girls turned 
the incident against her shows how they were 
hardened to all human feeling, and the cunning 
art which, on all occasions, characterized their 
proceedings. Th.t such an insolent interrup- 
tion and disturbance, on their part, was per- 



mitted without rebuke from the Court, is a 
perpetual dishonor to every member of it. The 
scene exhibited at this moment, in the meeting- 
house, is worthy of an attempt to Imagine. 
The most terrible sensation was naturally pro- 
duced by the swooning of the prisoner, the 
loudly uttered and savage mockery of the girls, 
and their going simultaneously into, fits, scream- 
ing at the top of their voices, twisting into all 
possible attitudes, stiffened as in death, or 
gasping with convulsive spasms of agony, and 
crying out. at intervals, 'There is the Black 
Man whispering in Cloyse's eur.' 'There is a 
yellow-bird flying round her head.' John In- 
dian, on such occasions, used to confine his 
achievements to tumbling and rolling his ugly 
body about the floor. The deepest commisera- 
tion was felt by all for the ' afllicted,' and men 
and women rushed to hold and soothe them. 
There was, no doubt, much loud screeching, 
and some miscellaneous faintings through the 
whole crowd. At length, by bringing the suf- 
ferers into contact with Goody Cloyse, the diar 
bolical fluid passed back into her, they were all 
reheved, and the examination was resumed." 

In fact, peither age nor condition had any 
effect upon the prosecutors. Rebecca Jacobs, 
partially deranged, was snatched from her four 
young children, one of them an infant, and the 
others who were able to walk following after 
her. crying bitterly. Martha Carrier, who the 
children said had promise from the Black Man 
of b' ing Queen of Hell, and who had sternly 
rebuked the magistrates, and declared she had 
seen no man so black as themselves, was made 
to hear her children, seven or eight years 
old, confess themselves witches who had set 
their hands to the book, testify against her, and 
procure her death. Rebecca Nurse, past three 
score and ten, wife of a wealthy citizen, ven- 
erated by high and low, was brought to trial in 
her infirm condition, accused by the girls at the 
very time when she was praying for them. On 
the jury's bringing in a verdict of innocence, 
they were reprimanded by the Chief-Justice, 
and remanded to confinement till they brought 
in a verdict of guilty ; and though her neighbors 
made affidavits and petitions in her behalf, she 
was condemned ; after which Mr. Parris, who 
had long since gotten affairs into his own 
hands, had intimidated outsiders, and was 
having everything his own way, prepared one 
of his most solemn scenes to further excite the 
people ; and Mrs. Nurse, delicate, if not dying 
as it was. after her shameful trial, her cruel 
and indecent exposures, was brought into 
church, covered with chains, and there excom- 
municated by her old pastor, Nicholas Noyes — 
the crowd of spectators believing tliey saw a 
woman not only lost for this life, but barred 
out from salvation in the life to come. She 
was thrown, after death, into a hole beneath 
the gallows ; but her husband and sons recov- 
ered her body in the night, brought it home to 
her weeping daughters, and buried it in her 
own garden. 

With that, the girls, grown bold, had flown 
at higher game than any, the Rev. George 
Burroughs, one of Mr. Parris's rivals and pre- 
decessors. Tills person had suffered almost 
everything in Salem ere leaving it for Casco 
Bay ; he had lost his wife and children there, 
his salary had not been paid him, and he had 
even been arrested in his pulpit for the debt 
of his wife's funeral expenses, which he bad 



22 



SALEM. 



previously paid by an order on tbe church- 
treasurer. The malignities that he now endured 
are only explicable by remembering his un- 
popularity in Salem ; he was cast inio a black 
dungeon, accused of witchcraft on the evidence 
of such feats of strength as holding out a gun 
by inserting the j. int of a finger in the muzzle, 
and after that accused of the murder of his two 
wires and of his children, of Mr. Lawson's wife 
and child, and of various others, covered witn 
all abuses, and finally hung, and buried beneath 
the gallows, with his chin n.nd foot protruding 
from the ground. Mr. Upham gives a chapter 
in his trial too graphically to escape quotation 
here: 

" The examination of Mr. Burroughs pre- 
sented a spectacle, all things considered, of 
rare interest and curiosity : the grave dignity 
of the magistrates ; the plain, dark figure of 
the prisoner ; the half-crazed, half-demoniac 
aspect of the girls ; the wild, excited crowd ; 
the horror, rage, and pallid exasperation of 
Lawson, Goodman Fuller, and others, also of 
the relatives and friends ot Burroughs's two 
former wives, as the deep damnation of their 
taking off and the secrets of their bloody graves 
were being brought to light; and the child on 
the stand telling her awlul tales of ghosts in 
winding-sheets, wilh napkins round their heads, 
pointing to their death-wounds, and saying that 
'their blood did cry for vengeance' upon their 
murderer. The prisoner stands alone: all were 
raving around him, while he is amazed, as- 
tounded at such folly and wrong in others, and 
humbly sensible of his own unwortbiness, bowed 
down under tlie mysterious Providence that 
permitted such things for a season, yet strong 
and steadfast in conscious innocence and up- 
rightness." ,. 

But though such countless arrests and trials 
and condemnations were had, and so many 
executions, the most startling incident among 
them all was the death of old Giles Corey. 

Giles Corey was a man of marked traits, not 
the least marked of which was an unbending 
will and a heart that knew no fear. In the 
course of his long life he had never submitted 
to a wrong without retaliation, he had suflered 
no encroachments on his rights, he had cared 
nothing for the speech of other people, but had 
always spoken his own mind, let who would 
stand at the door ; he had quarreled with his 
acquaintance.^, beaten his servants, sued his 
neighbors for slander, and, such experience 
tenciing toward small self-cont.ol, be had been 
involved in ceaseless litigation, and as often 
as not had teen in the right. Late in life he 
married, for his third wife, Martha, a woman of 
intelligence beyond her time, and joined the 
Church ; and he was eighty years old when the 
"Witchcraft excitement began. With his ardent 
and eager temperament, nothing abated by 
age, he was immediately interested in the 
afflicted children, anrl soon as fanatical as the 
worst in regard to them. That his wife should 
laugh at it all, should suppose those God-fear- 
ing men, the magistrates, blind, should assert 
there was no such thing as a witch at all, and, 
when he had seen their agonies with his own 
eyes, that the artiicted children did but dissem- 
ble, and should hide his saddle that he might 
stay at home, and no longer swell the press that 
urged the matter on, filled him with amazement 
and rage ; he exclaimed angrily that the devil 
was in her, and, for all he knew, she might be 



a witch herself! When his wife was arrested, 
these words of his were remembered ; he was 
plied in court with artful questions, whose re- 
plies must needs be unfavorable to her ; two of 
his sons-in-law testified to his recent disagree- 
ment witti her, to his bewitched cattle, and 
other troubles, and he was obliged to give a 
deposition against her. But he could not be 
forced to make the deposition amount to any- 
thing ; and, indignant wilh him for that con- 
tumacy, his wife's accusers became his own, 
and he was cast into jail for a wizard. Once 
imprisoned, with leisure to reflect, conscious 
that he had never used witchcraft in his life, 
he began to believe that others might be as in- 
nocent as he, to be aware of the hallucination 
to which he had been subject, to see that his 
wife, by that time sentenced to execution, was 
a guiltless martyr, to feel his old love and ten- 
derness for her return upon him, to be filled 
with remorse for his anger with her, for his 
testimony and deposition, and with his old hot 
wrath against his two sons-in-laws, whose ^ord 
had done her to deatn. 

He comprehended the whole situation, that 
unless he confessed to a lie nothing could save 
him, that if he were tried he would certainly 
be condemned, and his property would be con- 
fiscated under the attainder. He desired in 
his extremity some punishment on his two un- 
faithful sons-in-law, some reward for his two 
faithful ones. He sent for the necessary instru- 
ments and made his will, giving all his large 
property to his two faithful sons-in-law, and 
guarding the gift with every careful form of 
words known to the law. That properly done 
and witnessed, his resolve was taken. He 
determined never to be tried. If he was not 
tried, he could not be condemned; if he was not 
condemned, this dispo-ition of his property 
could not be altered. Tlie only way to accom- 
plish this was by refasing to plead either guilty 
or not guilty. And this he did. When taken 
into court he maintained a stuijbnrn silence, he 
refused to open his lips ; and till the ]uisoner 
answered "guilty" or "not guilty,'' the trial 
could not take place. For this, also, there was 
but one remedy, and old Giles Corey knew it ; 
but his mind was made up ; it was the least 
atonement he could make his wife—to requite 
the sons that had been loyal to her, and to meet 
himself a harder fate than he had given her. 
Perhaps, too, he saw that it needed such a 
thing to awaken the people, and he was the 
voluntary sacrifice. He received uniiinchingly 
the sentence of the Peine forte et dure, and from 
that moment never uttered a syllable. Tltis 
unspeakably dreadful torture conde iined one 
to a, dark cell, there, with only a strip of cloth- 
ing, to be laid upon the floor with an iron 
weight upon the chest, receiving the alternate 
fare of tinee mouthfuls of bread on one day, 
and on the next three draughts of the nearest 
stagnant water, till obstinacy yielded or death 
arrived. In Giles Corey's case— excommunica- 
tion having been previously pronounced on a 
self-murderer by the inexorable church-mem- 
bers— the punishment was administered in the 
outside air, and the weights were of stone ; he 
was strong, in spite of years ; the anguish was 
long; pressed by the burden, his tongue pro- 
truded from his mouth, a constable struck it 
back with his stafl", but not a word came with 
it, and he died unflinching, never pleading 
either guilty or not guilty. With this before 



SALEM. 



23 



unheard-of judicial murder in ttie Colonies, a 
universal liorror shuddered through the people 
already surfeited with horrors, and all at once 
their eyes opened to the enormity of these pro- 
ceedings. Three days afterward, the last pro- 
cession of victims, once hooted and insulted as 
they went, jolted now in silence tlirough the 
long and tedious ways to the summit of Witch 
Hill, and, taking their farewell look at the wide 
panorama of land and sea, the last witches were 
hanged. It was in vain for Cotton Mather to 
utter his incendiary eloquence beneath the 
gallows and endeavor to rekindle the dying 
fires in the breasts of the sorry and silent 
people; for Mr. Noyes to exclaim, as the bodies 
,- swung off, " What a sad thing it is to see eight 

jV-^AA* firebrands of hell hanging there !" The min- 
y^ isters exhorted, the frantic girls cried out on 
'\\ r.s .'Ohe and another, and flew at so high a quarry 
OJ^ as the wife of the Rev. John Hale, a woman of 
almost perfect life ; and though Mrs. Hale's 
husband had persecuted others, when the 
thunderbolt fell on his own roof, he awoke to 
his delirium : then the Commoners of Andover 
instituted suits for slander, and with that the 
bubble burst, and not another witch was hung. 
The whole Colony was shaken with remorse, 
and the reaction from the excitement was like 
death. The accusing girls came out of their 
convulsions unregarded ; one or two afterward 
married ; the rest, with the exception of Ann 
Putnam, led openly shameless lives. Seven 
years afterward, bereft of her father and 
mother, and with the care of a large family ot 
young brothers and sisters, and a constitution 
utterly broken down by her career of fits and 
contortions, Ann Putnam read in the open 
church a confession of her crimes, partook of 
the communion, and the tenth year following 
she died. It is a brief and very strange confes- 
sion ; in it all the sin is laid upon Satan, and so 
artlessly that one can but give her innocence 
the benefit of a doubt ; and whether the girl 
was the subject of delusive trances or of wick- 
edness, must remain a mystery until the science 
of psychology has made further advances than 
it has done to-day. When the people had fully 
come to their senses, tlie jury that had passed 
yerdict on the accused wrote and circulated an 



avowal of their regret ; Judge Sewall rose in 
his place in the Old South Church in Boston and 
made a public acknowledgment of his error, 
and supplication for foruiveness, and every year 
thereafter kept a day of humiliation and prayer; 
but Chief-Justice Stoughton remained as infotu- 
ated at the last as at the first ; and of the min- 
isters who had been active in the vile work, 
Cotton Mather, Sam. Parris, Nicholas Noyes, 
there is not a particle of evidence that one ot 
them repented or regretted it. But Salem 
Village was ruined, its farms were neglected, 
its roads broken up, its fences scattered, its 
buildings out of order, industrial pursuits were 
destroyed, famine came, taxes were due and 
lands were sold to meet them, whole families 
moved away, and the place became almost 
depopulated. One spot there, says the histo- 
rian, bears marks of the blight to day — the old 
meeting-house road. "The Surveyor of High- 
ways ignores it. The old, gray, moss-covered 
stone walls are dilapidated and thi-own out of 
line. Not a house is on either of its borders, 
and no gate opens or path leads to any. Neglect 
and desertion " brood over the contiguous 
ground. On bolh sides there are the remains 
of cellars, which declare that once tt was lined 
by a considerable population. Along this road 
crowds thronged in 1G02, for weeks and months, 
to witness the examinations." 

It is a satisfaction to the vindictive reader of 
the annals of this time to know that Sam. Parris 
— guilty of divination by his own judgment, since 
he had plainly used the afflicted children for 
that purpose — was dismissed from his pastorate, 
where he had played the part rather of wolf than 
of shepherd, and finished his days in ignominy 
and want. While every reader will be glad to 
know that a good man, Joseph Green, came to 
soothe the sorrows and bind up the wounds, 
and destroy as much as might be all memory of 
wrong and suffering in the place. But though, 
for a few year?, various L gislatiires passed 
small acts of acknowledgment and compensa- 
tion, yet, wars and other troubles supervening, 
and possible shame at reopening the past, it so 
happens that for several ot the murdered peo- 
ple the attainder has never been taken off to 
the present day. 



NEWBURYPORT. 



TjEATino Salem behind, the traveler passes 
beautiful Beverly, the home of Lucy Larcom, 
and whose beach is neighbor of the wonderful 
Bmging one where the sands make mystical 
music under foot,, passes the little town which 
Gall Hamilton renders interesting by living 
there, passes Ipswich, the old Agawam, the 
picture of an English village, in a dimple be- 
tween hills, and with the tides of its quiet 
river curving about it, passes ancient Eowley, 
and arrives at another historic and famous 
town, whose rulers once changed its name to 
Portland, but whose ppople scorned to do so 
much as even to refuse the new name, but con- 
tinued to the present day to call it Newbury- 
port. 

Newburyport is in some external respects 
not unlike the neighboring towns of note, but 
in others she is a place by herself. Situated 
on the Merrimack — the busiest river in the 
world, and one of the loveliest, and whose 
banks, owing to the configuration of the 
coast, seem here, like the Nile banks, to run 
out and push back the sea that it may have the 
greater room to expand its beauty in — the 
town has both a scenic and a social isolation 
which has had a great deal to do with the 
characteristics of its population. These char- 
acteristics, with but one or two exceptions, 
have been the same for all time, since time 
began for Newburyport. It is true that the 
municipality, which once petitioned General 
Court to relieve it of the burden of the old 
wandering negress Juniper, has so far improved 
as now to be giving a pauper outside the alms- 
house an allowance outof which he has built him 
a cottage in an adjoining town, and bought him 
some shares of railroad stock ; but for the rest, 
the place has known no change ; it has not 
varied from its dullness since the Embargo laid 
a heavy hand upon it and the Great Fire scat- 
tered ashes over it, and the people mind their 
own business to-day just as thoughtlessly as 
they did when they pronounced the verdict 
upon the body of Elizabeth Hunt in 1693, "We 
Judge, according to our best light and contients, 
that the death of said Elizabeth Hunt was 
* * * by some soden sloping of her breatn." 
Strangers come into town, stay a while, and de- 
part, leaving behind them some trail of ro- 
iLance or of misbehavior — the citizen takes 



small heed of them, and presently forgets them ; 
so rarely do they assimilate themselves with 
the population, that the names there to-day are 
the names to be found in the chronicles ol 
1635, and, unmixed with strange blood, genera- 
tions hand down a name till it comes to stand 
for a trait. The people, too, have a singular 
intelligence for a community not metropolitan, 
possibly because, being a seafaring tribe, their 
intercourse with foreign countries enlightens 
them to an unusual degree. The town, except 
for one religious revival that lasted forty 
days, suspended business, drew up the shipping 
in the dock, and absorbed master and mistress, 
man and maid, has seldom been disturbed by 
any undue contagion of popular feeling, has 
seldom followed a fashion in politics unsug- 
gested by its own necessities, and has been in 
ifact as suflacient to itself as the dew of Eden. 
The dissimilarity of its population from that of 
other places is only illustrated by the story of a 
sailor, impressed Into the British Navy too 
hurriedly to get the address of a ftiend, and 
who, after tossing about the world for fifty 
years, returned home and advertised for " an 
old shipmate whom he desired to share a for- 
tune with." Neither has the town ever been 
a respecter of persons, but, democratic in the 
true acceptation of the term, wealth is but 
little accounted where almost every one is 
comfortable, talent gives no more pre-eminence 
than can be grasped by means of it, and if it 
were the law now, as it was then, five leading 
citizens would just as easily be arrested and 
fined for being absent from town-meeting at 
eight o'clock in the morning as they were in 
1638. United to all this there is an extremely 
independent way of thinking hereditary among 
the people. In 1649 Thomas Scott paid a fine 
of ten shillings rather than learn the catechism, 
and was allowed to do so ; a century later, Eich- 
ard Bartlet refused communion with a church 
whose pastor wore a wig, asserting with assu- 
rance that all who wore wigs, unless repenting be- 
fore death, would certainly be damned ; not long 
before, the Itev. John Tufts here struck a 
death-blow at Puritanism by issuing a book of 
twenty-seven psalm-tunes to be sung in public 
worship, five tunes only having previously been 
used ; an act so stoutly contested as an inroad 
of the Scarlet Woman — for, said his opponents, 



NEWEUEYPOET. 



25 



it is first singing by rule, then praying by rule, 
and then popery — that it was probably owing 
to the persecutions of the long warfare that 
subsequently the innovator left his parish in 
dudgeon under a charge of indecent behavior ; 
and though none of the churches reached the 
point attained by one some dozen miles away, 
which voted, " This meeting, not having unity 
with John Collins's testimony, desires him to be 
silent till the Lord speak by him to the satis- 
faction of the meeting," yet there stands on 
the record the instruction to a committee ap- 
pointed to deal with ceitain recusants, " to see 
if something could not be said or done to draw 
them to our communion again, and if toe can- 
not draw them hy fair means, then to determine 
what means to take with them." Some one 
once said that Newburyport was famous for its 



piety and privateering, but in these instructions 
the piety and privateering are oddly inter- 
mingled. This same independence of thought 
found notable expression when, in the early 
days, Boston and Salem, alarmed at the incur- 
sions of the Indians, proposed to the next set- 
tlements the building of a stone wall eight 
feet high to inclose them all, as a rampart 
against the common foe ; which proposition 
Newburyport scouted with disdain, and declared 
the wall should be a living one, made of men, 
and forthwith built a garrison-house on her bor- 
ders. And it is the same quality that after- 
ward appeared when, some time previous 
to the Boston tea-party, the first act of the 
Revolution was signalized in Newburyport by 
the confiscation of a cargo of tea under direc- 
tion of the town authorities : and that prompted 

■-- vrvV t V-} "-. 




"STANDINO ON THE QUAKTEE-DECK, HB SUDDENLY TURNED AND OBDEKED THE BKITISH IXAG TO BE STRUCK 1" 



26 



NEWBUKTPORT. 



the Stamp Act Riots, and made It a fact that 
not a single British st£,mp was ever paid lor or 
used in Newbnryport; and that, diiriiig all the 
long and trying struggle of the llevolution, did 
not allow a single town-school to be suspended. 
The old town has no trivial history, as these 
circumstances might intimate. Long before 
the devolution, at the popular uprising and the 
imprisonment of Sir Edmund Andros, old Sam 
Bartlet galloped ofl', so eager for the fray, thnt 
" hiH long rusty sword, trailing on the ground, 
left, as it came in contact with the stones in the 
road, a stream of lire nil the way." It was Lieu- 
tenant Jacques, of Newburyport, who i)ut an 
end to the war with the Norridgewook Indians, 
by killing their ally and inciter, the French 
Jesuit, Sebastian Raile. Here Arnold's expedi- 
tion against Quebec encamped and recruited ; 
and here were built and manned not only the 
privateers, that the better feeling of to-day calls 
pirates, which raked British commerce to the 
valae of millions into this port, but the sloop 
Wasp, which fought as fiercely as her namesake 
fights, in three months capturing thirteen mer- 
chantmen, engaging four ships-of-the-line. and 
finally, after a bitter struggle, going down with 
ail her men at the guns and all her colors flying. 
It is still interesting to read of her exploits, 
copied in ttie journal of the old Marine Insur- 
ance rooms as the news came in day by day, 
and to fancy the ardor and spirit with which 
those lines were penned by hands long since 
ashes ; ardor and spirit universally shared, 
since, before that brief career of valor, New- 
buryport had on the 31st of May, anticipated 
the Declaration of Independence, published on 
the 19th of July following, by instructing tlie 
Congress at Philadelphia that, if the Colonies 
should be declared independent, " this town 
will, with their lives and tortunes, support them 
in the measure." Here, too, was built the first 
ship that ever displayed our flag upon the 
Thames, a broom at her peak that day, after 
Van Tromp's fashion, to tell the story of how 
she had swept the seas. Nor is the town unfa- 
miliar with such daring deeds as that done, 
during the Revolution, when a British trans- 
port of four guns was observed in the bay veer- 
ing and tacking to and Iro through the log, as 
if uncertain of her whereabouts, and, surmising 
that she supposed herself in Boston Bay, Cap- 
tain Oflin Boardman, with his men, went ofl' in 
a whaleboat and offered his services to pilot her 
in, the offer being of course accepted, the siiip 
hove to, and Captain Oflin Boardman presently 
standing on the quarter-deck exchanging the 
usual greetings with the master of the trans- 
port while his companions mounted to his side; 
that done, he suddenly turned and ordered the 
British flag to be struck, his order was exe- 
cuted, and, wholly overpowered in their sur- 
prise, the crew and the transport were safely 
carried over the bar and moored at the wharves 
in Newburyport. Indeed, her history declares 
the place to have been in other respects far in 
advance of many of her contemporaries ; she 
had, not only the first of our ships upon tlie 
Thames, but the first ch ,in-bridge in America, 
as vveil as the first tuU-bridge, Initiated the first 
insurance company, had the first incorporated 
woolen mill, the first incorporated academy, 
the first female high school, two of the first 
members of the Anti-Slavery Society, which 
numbered twelve in all, the first volunteer 
company for the Revolution, the first volunteer 



company against the Rebellion, the first bishop, 
and the first graduate of Harvard — the last at a 
time when sundry students guilty of misde- 
meanors were publicly whipped by the presi- 
dent, a punishment, whether unfortunately or 
otherwise, now out of date in that institution, to 
which Newburyport has given some presidents 
and many professors. Washington, Lafayette, 
Talleyrand, have all made some spot in the 
town famous, one livinj; here, one being enter- 
tained here, and one performing his great sleep- 
ing-act in a bed in the old Pnnce House. From 
here Brissot went back to France to die on the 
scalTold of the Girondists. Here Whitefield 
died and lies entombed. Here Parson Milton, 
that son of thunder, used to make his evening 
family prayer a pattern for preachers : " O 
Lord ! keep us this night from the assassin, the 
incendiary, and the devil, for Christ's sake, 
amen." Here the weighty jurist Theophilus 
Pa'sons was born and bred ; here John Quincy 
Adams and Rufus King studied law ; here 
Cushing rose, and Garrison, and Gougli ; here 
the arreat giver George Peabody once dwelt and 
often came; here John Pierrepoint wrote his 
best verses ; here the artist Bricher first found 
inspiration ; here Harriet Livermore, that 
ardent missionary of the East whom "Snow- 
bound " celebrates, was born ; here the Lowells 
sprung ; hardly more than a gunshot off, on 
one side, is the ancestral home of the Longfel- 
ows, and, on the other, Whittier lives and 
sings. Here, also, has been the home of vari- 
ous inventors of renown ; the compressibility 
of water was here discovered ; here steel en- 
graving by a simple and beautiful process was 
invented; here the muchine for inakiug nails, 
which had previously been painlully hammered 
out one by one ; here an instrument tor mea- 
suring the speed with which a ship goes through 
the sea, and here a new span for timber bridges, 
used now on most of our larger rivers, bridging 
the Merrimack, Kenneb'^c, Connecticut, and 
Schuylkill ; almost every mechanic, indeed, has 
some fancy on which he spends his leisure, one 
amusing liimself with making the delicate cal- 
culations necessary, and then just as ciolicately 
burnishing brazen reflectors for telescopes, be- 
fore his heart was broken by those refractors 
with which Salford and Tuttle (both connected 
with the town) have swept the sky ; another 
occupying himself, to the neglect of business, 
with the model of a machine in which all his 
soul was rapt, and which, unknown to him, an 
ancient had invented a couple of thousand 
years ago, while others are busy with the 
more useful low-water reporters, and with 
those improvements in the manufacture of 
tobacco which have all sprung trom a son of 
the town. It is in mechanics that Newbury- 
port has always excelled ; her shipyards once 
lined all the water-side there ; shortly after 
the Revolution, wishing to export lumber, and 
having but few ships, she bound the lumber 
together in firm rafts, with a cavity in the 
centre for provisions and possible shelter, and 
furnishing them with secure though rude sail- 
ing apparatus, consigned them to the winds 
and waves, and after voyages of twenty-six 
days they were registered in their ports on 
the other side of the Atlantic ; but before that 
experiment her ships were, and they still are, 
models to the whole world, for here were 
launched those fleetest clippers that erer cut 
the wave, the Dreadnaught and the Racer. 



NEWBUKTPORT. 



27 



They go out, but they never come back ; great 
East Indiamen no longer ride at anchor in her 
offing as they used to do ; the bar of tlie Merri- 
mack, which once in abont a hundre.l years 
accumulates into such an Insuperable obstacle 
that the waters find a now channel, is a foe 
they do not care to face when once piloted safely 
over its white line ; and, though many things 
have been done with piers, and buoys, and a 
breakwater built by Government and crushed 
like a toy by the next storm, it ?till binds its 
spell about Newburyport commerce. Possibly 
if, by any other magic, the town could ever 
grow sufficiently to require the tilling up of the 
flats, then the stream, inclosed in a narrower 
and deeper channel, would find sufficient force 
to drive before it the envious sands which now 
the Cape Ann currents sweep iuto its mouth. 

Nevertheless, the bar alone is not adequate 
to account for the financial misfortunes of the 
town ; ships go up to New Orleans over much 
more dangerous waters ; and the Embargo of 
the early part of the century bears by far tlie 
greater responsibility. Then the great hulks 
rotted at the wharves unused, with tar-barrels, 
which the angry saUors called Madison's Night- 
caps, inverted over tlie topmasts to save the 
rigging, while their crews patrolled the streets 
in riotous and hungry bands, and observed the 
first anniversary of the Embargo Act with toll- 
ing belJs, minute-guns, flags at hali-mast, and 
a procession with muffled drums and crapes. 
Perhaps it was owing to this state of feeling in 
the town that the old slanders of her showing 
blue-lights to the befogged enemy arose. To- 
gether with the Embargo came the Great Fire ; 
every wooden town has sullered a conflagra- 
tion, and Newburyporc has always been a prey 
to the incendiary ; but her celebrated fire broke 
out on a spring night some sixty years ago, 
when nearly every one was wrapped in the 
first plumber, and spread with the speed of the 
lightnings over a track of more than sLxteen 
acres, in the most compact and wealthy portion 
of the town. Such an immense property was 
destroyed that the whole place was impover- 
ished ; many families were totally beggared ; 
people hurried to the scene from a dozen 
miles away ; women passed the buckets in the 
ranks, and helpkss crowds swung to and fro 
in the thoroughfares. The spectacle is de- 
scribed by an old chronicle as having been 
terribly sublime ; the wind, changing, blew 
strongly, and drove the flames in fresh direc- 
tions, where they leaped in awful columns high 
into the air, and stretched a sheet of tire from 
street to street j the moon became obscured in 
the muiky atmosphere that luing above the 
town, but the to^sn itself was lighted, as bril- 
liantly as by day, and the heat melted the 
glass in the windows of houses not destroyed ; 
while tiie crash of falling walls, the roaring of 
chimneys like distant thundur, the volumes of 
flames wallowing upward from the ruins and 
filling the air with a shower of fire into which 
the birds fluttered and dropped, the weird re- 
flection in the river, the lowing of the cattle, 
the cries of distress from the people, made the 
scene cruelly memorable ; and thougii after- 
ward that portion of the town was rebuilt 
with brick, Newburyport never recovered from 
the shock and loss. Some years subsequeutly 
a boy of seventeen was convicted of another 
arson, and in spite of much exertion to the 
contrary, expiated the penalty of the law. But 



I a flaming Nemesis fell upon the town, perhaps 
for having allowed the boys execution, and 
ever since that time other incendiaries, emu- 
; lous of his example, have constantly made it 
\ their victim; one, in particulai, being so fre- 
quent in his attempts, that on a windy or 
stormy night the blaze was so sure to burst 
forth that the citizens could not sleep in their 
beds ; he appeared to be the subiect of a mania 
for burning churches, almost all of the sixteen 
in town having been fired, sometimes two to- 
gether, and on several occasion successfully; 
and no dweller in Newburyport will easily for- 
get the night on which the old North Church 
was burned, when every flake of the wild snow- 
storm seemed to be a s.iark of fire, and more 
than one superstitious wretch, plunging out 
iuto the gale, could find no centre to ihe uni- 
versal glare, and shuddered with fright in 
belief that the Day of Judgment had come at 
last. 

But one extraordinary thing or another is 
always happening in Newburyport ; if it is not 
a fire, it is a gale ; and if it is not a gale, it is 
an earthquake. The situation of the toivn is 
very fine. As you approach it bv land, bleak 
fields and lichened boulders warn you of t!ie 
inhospitable sea-coast ; but once past theu' bar- 
rier, and you are in the midst of gardens. The 
town lies on a gentle hillside, with such slope 
and gravelly bottom that an hour after the 
heaviest rains its streets afford good walking. 
Beiiind it lies an excellent glacial moraine and 
a champaign country, shut in by low hills, and 
once, most probably, the bed of the river. Its 
adjacent territory is netted in riveis and rivu- 
lets ; the broad Merrimack, with its weird and 
strange estuary, imprisoned by Plum Island ; 
the Artichoke, a succession of pools lying in 
soft, semi-shadows beneath the overhanging 
growth of beech and oak, and feathery elms 
lighting the darker masses, each pool enfolded 
in such wi e that one sees no outlet, but slides 
along with the slow tide, lifts a bough, and 
Slips iuto the next, where some white-stemmed 
birch perhaps sends a perpetual rustle through 
the slumberous air, a wild grape-vine climbs 
from branch to branch, or an early redd<^ning 
tupeio siiakes its gay mantle in the scattpred 
sun, and with its reflex in the dark trans- 
parency, wakens one from half the sleepy spell 
of tLe euchantmeut there ; these streams, with 
the Quascacunquen or Parker, the Little, Pow- 
wow, Back, and Rowley rivers, with their 
slender, but foaming black and white aflluents, 
all make it a place of meadows ; and he who 
desires to see a meadow in perfection, full of 
emerald and golden tints, and claret shadows, 
withdrawing into distance till lost in the spas- 
kle of the sea, must seek it here, where Ileade 
found material for his exquisite and dainty 
marsh and meadow views. 

The scenery around the town, it may thus be 
imagined, is something of unusual beauty ; on 
one side are to be had the deciduous woods of 
the Stackyard Gate, where the carriage-wheels 
crackle through winding miles of fragrant 
brake and fern, and on the other the statt^Jy 
pines and hemlocks of FoUymill. the air sweet 
as an orange-grove with resinous perfume, 
while the river-road to Haverhill, with West 
Amesbury swathed in azure mist upon the op- 
posite hill, and sapphire reaches of the stream 
unfolding one after anotiier, is a series of rap- 
tures. The people, well acquainted with the 



TTEWBUETPOKT. 



beauty that surrounds them, are very fond of 
their chief river ; It is the scene of frolicking the 
summer long, and in winter its black and ice- 
edged tides seem to be the only pulses of the 
frozen town. To some the life upon this river 
is only play, to others it is deadly earnest, for a 
large portion of those who live along the banks 
on the Water street, the most picturesque of 
the highways, are fishermen and their house- 
holds, familiar with all the dangers of the seas 
— the babies there rocked in a dory, the men, 
sooner or Later, wrecked upon the Georges ; 
meanwhile the men mackerel all summer down 
■ iu the Bay of Chaleurs, pilot oflf and on the 
coast dark nights and dreary days, run the bar 
and the breakers with a storm following the 
keel ; many of them, as they advance in life, 
leave their seafaring and settle down at shoe- 
making, or buy a plot of land and farm it in 
an untaught way, but just as many find their 
last home in a grave rolled between two 
waves. 

When a storm comes up, and the fog-banks 
sweep in from sea, hiding the ray of the twin 
harbor-light?, and the rote upon the beach- 
which every night is heard through the quiet 
streets beating like a heart, Skvells into a sullen 
and unbroken roar— when the shipyards are 
afloat, the water running breast-high across 
the wharves, the angry tides rising knee-deep 
in the lower lanes, and the spray tossed over 
the tops of the houses th^re whose foundations 
begin to tremble and whose dwellers fly for 
safety, then the well-sheltered people up in the 
remoie High street, where nothing is known of 
the storm but the elms tossing their boughs 
about, may have sorry fancies of some vessel 
driving on Plum Island, of parting decks and of 
unpitled cries m the horror of blackness and 
breaker— may even hear the minute-guns in 
pauses of the gale ; but the stress of weather 
falls upon the homes and hearts of these 
watchers on the Water street, for to them each 
swell and burst of the blast means danger to 
their own roof and the life snatched from a 
husband's or a father's lips. Mrs. E. Vale 
Smith in her history of Newburyport makes 
thrilliug mention of these storms, with the 
wrecks of the Primrose, the Pocahontas, the 
Argus, and others, and every resident of the 
place has had before his eyes the picture which 
she draws of " the heavy moaning of the sea — 
a bark vainly striving to cl«ar the breakers — 
blinding snow — a slippery deck — stiflT and 
glazed ropes -hoarse commands that the cruel 
winds seize and carry far away from the ear of 
the sailor — a crash of tons of falling water 
beating in the liatches — shrieks wliich no man 
heard, and ghastly corpses on the deceitful, 
shifting sands, and tlie great ocean-cemetery 
still holding in awful silence the lost bodies of 
the dead." Such things, of course, make the 
place the home of romance, and Mr. George 
Lunt, a poet of no mean pretensions and a 
native of the town, has founded his novel of 
"Easiford" on the incidents its daily life 
affords. 

Newburyport has also known the effects of 
other convulsions of nature ; a hailstorm, with 
a deposit twelve inches in depth, is still spjken 
of there, together with 8now:>torms tunneled 
from door to door, a northeaster thai blew the 
spray of the sea a dozen miles inland and 
loaded the orchard boughs with salt crystals 
%ud whirlwinds mighty enough to blow dow 



one meeting-house and to lift imother with ali 
the people in it and set it in a different spot- 
whirlwinds coming a quarter of a century too 
soon, as, if they had but moved a meeting-house 
there at a later day, a parish would not have 
been so divided on the question of location as 
straightway to become, one-half of them. Epis- 
copalians for whom Queen Anne endowed a 
chapel. But worse than whirlwinds, storms, 
fires, or the devastating yeilow-fever that once 
nearly decimated the place, were the earth- 
quakes that for more than a hundred years, at 
one period, held high carnival there, and are 
still occasionally felt. The first of these oc- 
curred in 1638, on the noon of a summer day, 
as the colonists, assembled in town-meeting, 
were discussing their unfledged affairs. We 
can well imagine their consternation, just three 
yeara established, their houses built, woods 
felled, fields largely cleared, and the June corn 
just greenly springing up, to find that their en- 
campment on tills spot, so rich in soil, so con- 
venient to the sea, so well guarded from the 
Indian, had left them the prey to an enemy 
whose terrors were so much worse than all 
others in the degree in which they partook of 
the dark, unknown, and infinite. It was not 
long before another earthquake followed the 
first, its trembling and vibration and sudden 
shocks preceded, as that had been, by a roar 
like the bursting of great guns, while birds for- 
sook their nests, dogs howled, and the whole 
brute creation manifested the extreme of terror; 
by-and-by there came one that lasted a week, 
with six or eight shocks a day, then one where 
the shocks were repeated for half an hour with- 
out any cessation, and presently others where 
the ground opened and left fissures a foot in 
width, where sailors on the coast supposed tlieir 
vessels to have struck, the sea roared and 
swelled, flashes ot fire ran along the ground, 
amazing noises were heard like peals and claps 
of thundi'r, walls aild chimneys fell, cellars 
opened, floating islands were formed, springs 
were made dry in one site and burst out in an- 
other, and tons of fine white saud were thrown 
up, which, beuig cast upon the coals, burnt like 
brimstone. Various causes have been assigned 
to these earthquakes, not the least absurd of 
which was the supposition of a cave reaching 
from tht^ sea to the headwaters of the Merri- 
mack, filled with gases, into which the high 
tides rushing made the occurrence of the 
phenomena ; but as they have always appeared 
in connection with more tremendous distui'b- 
ances in other parts of the world, it is probable 
that they are but the same pulsations of the 
old earth's arteries, felt in Vesuvius or Peru 
with more terrible effect. Although there have 
been more than two hundred of these convul- 
sions, nobody was ever seriously injured by 
their means, and so used to them did the peo- 
ple become, that finally tiiey are spoken of in 
their records merely as "the earthquake," as 
one would speak of any natural event, of the 
tide or of tlie moon. For the last century, 
however, their outbursts have been of very in- 
frequent occurrence, and Itave nowise marred 
the repose of the sweet old place, which now 
and then awakens to storm or fever sufficient 
to prevent stagnation, but for the most part 
slumbers on serenely by its riverside, the ideal 
of a large and ancient country-town, peaceful 
enough, and almost beautiful enough, for Par- 
adise. 



DOVER. 



A DOZEN' miles above Portsmouth lies the old 
town o' Dover, on the route to tlie White 
Mountains, which hills, as it has been said, were 
first explored by a party from the place, and 
always previously bellered (both by the Indians 
and many of the settlers) to be haunted by 
powerful and splendid spirits. Dover is the old- 
est town in the State, and though Portsmouth 
may have the first ch\ircli-organ, Dover has the 
honor of having possessed the first church- 
edifice, strongly palisaded in the days of primi- 
tive worship there. This town is the Coclieco 
of the early settlers, and is situated upon a 
strt^am of that name, a branch of the Pisca- 
taqua, which by its cascades — one of more than 
thirfy-two feet — offered good opportunity of 
mill sites to the first fellers of the forest, allow- 
ing them to clear tlieir ground and manufacture 
their lumber at once. Of these opportunities 
later generations have not been slow to take 
advantage, and the flow of water now turns the 
ponderous machinery of multitudes of looms, 
the yards of whose manufacture are numbered 
only by millions, while an enormous backwater 
exists in the reserve of the neighboring town of 
Strafford, suflicient at any time to drown out a 
drouth. 

Of all the manufacturing towns of New Eng- 
land, Dover is one of the most picturesque, and, 
from some of the loftier points within its 
limits, meadow, lake, river and phantom 
mountain-ranges combine to make a varied 
view of pastoral beauty. But there are other 
views to the full as interesting for the lover of 
humanity, when at night all the mill-windows 
blaze out and are repeated in the river, or 
when at noon the thousands of operatives pour 
forth from the factory-gates, and busy Peace 
seems half disguised. Still it is Peace, and 
Prosperity beside her ; and much it would 
amaze some ghost of the dead and gone could 
he, without losing his thin and impalpable 
essence altogetlier, obtain a noonday glimpse 
of the scene of his old tioubles. For the place 
has not been In the past a haunt of Peace — from 
the time, during the last war with England, 
when the ships, kept from going to sea by the 
American powers, were drawn up the river to 
Dover lest they should be destroyed at the 
wharves of Portsmouth by the British powers, 
lo the liUiC, a hundred and seventy-live years 



before, when the followers of Mrs. Ann Hutch- 
inson, with their Antinomian heresies, stirred 
up sedition among a people for whose preserva- 
tion from English tyranny on the one hand, 
and Indian cruelty on the other, perfect unan- 
imity of heart and mind was necessary — with 
all the troubles in the meantime occasioned 
by Mason, who made claim, by royal grant, to 
the land the settlers had purchased of the 
Aborigines and all the troubles witti the Abori- 
gines themselves. 

Dover is more peculiarly the scene of the old 
Indian outrages than any other New England 
town can be considered, Inasmuch as it was not 
only there that the famous Waldron Massacre 
occurred, but the place was also the stage of 
most of the events that, during a dozen years, 
led up to that terrific night's work, and that 
constitute a bit of interesiing hisiory never 
faithfully written out, and which now probably 
never will be, several of the Unks being lost, 
and remaining only to be conjectured from 
their probabilities. 

In 1640 there were four distinct settlements 
on the Piscataqua and its confluent streams ; 
but each having an individual and voluntary 
management, and all of them being too much 
divided in opinion to establish a government 
of mutual concessions among themselves, and 
hope of any protection from the King, then in 
sorry plight himself, being out of the question, 
the four settlements agreed in one tiling, and 
unanimously requested permission to come 
under the jurisdiction of the Massachusetts 
Colony — a request very gladly granted, as, 
while reserving rights of property to the 
owners, it afforded that Colony better oppor- 
tunity to establish the boundaries, three miles 
north of the Merrimack and any branch thereof, 
which she had always claimed ; and in return 
for this opportunity she allowed deputies who 
were not Church-members to sit in the General 
Court— a privilege she had not given her own 
people, but which was perhaps necessary where 
but few, as in New Hampshire, were of the 
Puritan persuasion. Under this arrangement, 
Richard Waldron was for more than twenty 
years a deputy, and several years Speaker of 
the Assembly ; he was also a Justice, and the 
Sergeant^Major of the Militia in that part of 
the country ; and when the connection witb 



30 



DOVER. 



Massaclmsptts had been severed, he was, for a 
time, ihe Chief Magistrate of the Province. 
He had married in England ; and, being a 
person of some wealth, on his arrival here he 
had bought large tracts of land, received large 
grants for improvement, had built the first 
saw-mill on the Cocheco, followed it with 
others, and established i; trading-post with the 
Indians. He was evidently a man of remark- 
able character, respected by his neighbors 
for his uprightness, and everywhere for his 
ability. 

Whatever he did was done with a will ; as a 
magistrate he persecuted the Quakers to fhe 
extent of the law, tliough he was known to 
shed tears when passing sentence of death 
upon an oflender; as a landlord he fought tlie 
claiuis of Mason and his minions persistently, 
being thrice suspended from the Council, ^D>i 
twice sentenced to fines which he paid only 
after an arrest of his body ; while as a soldier 
he was no less zealous in behalf of the public 
interest than in private capacity he had proved 
himself in belialf of his own. He appears to 
have exercised a certain lascination on the 
Indians of the locality, being able for many 
years to do with them as he would, and Cocheco 
having long been spared by them when the 
w.a'-whoop resounded over almost every other 
settlement in the land — a circumstance aptly 
illustrating the adage that things are what you 
make them, since, so long as the Indians were 
treated like brothers, they fulfilled the law ot 
love, in rude but laithiul manner ; but once 
trapped like wild beasts, and wild beasts they 
became. . 

These Indians were chiefly the Pennacooks, 
a tribe belonging to the region of the Merri- 
mack and its tributaries, who truded their 
pelts at Waldron's post for ammuution, blan- 
kets, fineries, and such articles as they were 
allowed to have, and who on more than one 
occasion showed their capability tor gratitude 
just as strongly as they subsequently showed it 
for revenge. They sometimes took advantage 
of Waldron's absence to procure from his part- 
ner the liquor which he would not sell to 
them ; but in the main they seemed to have a 
wholesome fear of him, not unmixed with 
aflection and trust in his honor. This tribe 
had been almost annihilated by the Mohawks, 
or Men-eaters, of whom they entertained a 
deadly terror, and by an ensuing pestilence ; 
and being once accused of unfriendly inten- 
tions. l)y messengers sent from the settlements, 
they did not scruple to disarm suspicion by be- 
tiaying their own weakness, and averring that 
they consisted of only twenty-tour warriors, 
witii their squaws and pappooses ; while their 
wise old sachem, Passaconaway, whose people 
believed that lie could make water burn, raise 
a green leaf fruia the ashes of a dry one, and 
nictamorphose iiluiself into a living flame, had 
early seen the lutility of attempts upon the 
English, had always advised his subjects to 
peace, and had imbued his son, Wonnelancet, 
60 strongly with his opinions, thai the latter 
never varied his rule Irom that which his 
father's had been. When the war with King 
Philip of the Wampanoags broke out, a body 
of soldiery was sent to the Pennacooks to as- 
certain the part they intended to play ; but 
seeing so large a company approaching, the 
Indians, who had had no idea of joining the 
war, concealed themselves ; upon which, la 



mere wantonness, the soldiery burned their 
wigwams and provisions. Instead of reveng- 
ing this injury, they only withdrew turther 
away, to the headwaters of the Connecticut, 
and passed a quiet winter in their usual pur- 
suits. In the meanwhile, however, tne other 
tribes — Tarra tines, Ossipees, and Pequawkets — 
became restless, and presently commenced hos- 
tilities upon the oui lying points ; and Fal- 
mouth, Saco Scarborough, Wells, Woolwich, 
Kittery, Durham, Salmon Falls, and other sputs, 
were red with slaugliters, and in three months 
eighty men were killed between the Piscataqua 
and the Kennebec. With the winter there 
came a tremendous fall of snow, and that, to- 
gether with the severity oi the season and the 
famine that distressed them, occasioned these 
Indians to sue lor peace ; and, coming to 
JUajDr Wahlron, they expressed sorrow for 
their conduct, and made rep.eated promises of 
better behavior for the future. But, this being 
done, the survivors among King Philip's men, 
who, at his death, teaving total extirpation, 
had fled from their own forests and dissemi- 
nated themselves among the northern tribes, 
inflamed them anew with memory of wrong 
and outrage, endured doubtless, as well as com- 
mitted, and the hostijities began again by a de- 
monstration at Falmouth, and were continued, 
the savages burning the homesteads as the 
dwellers abandoned them, till between Casco 
Bay and the Penobscot not a single English 
S'ttlement was left. At this time, Ihe Penna- 
cooks, who had not been concerned in the 
butcheiies at all, seem to have been used by 
Major Waldion to secure a peace which he 
almost despaired ol obtaining in any other 
way ; and it was through their agency, it may 
be supposed, that some four hundred of the 
Eastern Indians, of all tiibes, with their women 
and children, assembled in Cocheco, on the 
6th of September, 167G, to sign a full treaty 
of peace with Major Waldron, whom, the his- 
torian Belknap says, they looked upon as a 
friend and father. 

At this instant a body of soldiery, that had 
been dispatched to the northward, with orders 
to report to Major Waldron, the various- settle- 
ments on theii way being directed to reiniorce 
them as they might be able, arrived at Cocheco*, 
and, obediently to the instiuctions which they 
brought, Major Waldron had no choice but to 
surround and seize the whole four hundred of 
the confiding Indians. 

To Major Waldron this mnst have been an 
exceedingly trying moment: his plighted word, 
his honor, his friendship for this poor people 
whom he knew so well, all his sentiments as a 
man and a Christian, must have drawn him one 
way, while his duty as a soldier compelled hira 
the other To resign his command in the face 
of the enemy and under such instructions 
would doubtless have involved him in most 
serious difficulties ; to disobey these instruc- 
tions imposed upon him a too fearful responsi- 
bility in case of future depredations by those 
whom he should have spared against his or- 
ders ; he was a soldier, and his first duty was 
obedience ; and, for the rest, the young cap- 
tains of tlie force sent by the Governor were 
on fire with eagerness, and it was with diffi- 
culty he could restrain their martial spirit 
while he took counsel with himself. In this 
strait the Major unfortunately thought of a 
stratagem that miaht be used, and having, it is 



DOVER. 



31 



eald, assured the Indians, wlio had been a little 
alarmed by the arrival of the soldiery, that they 
had nothino to apprehend, lie proposed to them 
a sham fight with powder, but without balls, 
and on the signal of the discliarge of their guns 
—making that a pretext for considering tiiat 
the Indians had violated the understanding — 
the soldiery surrounded them, by an artful mili- 
tary movement, and with one or two exceptions 
made prisoners of the whole body. One of 
these exceptions was a young Indian who, 
escaping, sought ana found refuge with Mrs. 
Elizabeth Heard, and in his thankfulness pro- 
mised hei a recompense of future safety, and 
one daj redeemed the pledge. 

Although the Pennacooks were immediately 
separated from the other prisoners and dis- 
charged, upon which Major Waldron had per- 
haps relied for his own exculpation with them, 
and only half of the whole number were sent 
to Boston, where some six or eight, being con- 
victed of old murders, were hanged, and the 
rest sold into foreign slavery, yet they, together 
with all other Indians both far and near, re- 
garded it as a treachery upon Major Waldron's 
part that absolved them from all ties and de- 
manded a: bitter reparation. It is said that 
there is no sutlicient evidence of their having 
been invited to treat for more definite peace, 
and that tliey had no guarantee of protection in 
their assemblage at Cocheco ; but the mere fact 
of their quiet presence in thai number, an un- 
usual if not unprecedented thing with them, 
implies that the occasion was a special one, 
and that they must have had Major Waldron's 
verbal promise of safety at least, while, if it had 
been otherwise, it would have been absurd and 
impossible for them to regard the affair as so 
signal and abominable a treachery of his, 
worthy to be remembered with such undying 
hatred and expiated in his own person with 
such torture. This view of the facta is forti- 
fied, moreover, by the subsequent action of the 
Pennacooks. That they should have fancied 
themselves so peculiarly aggrieved" as they did, 
should so long in all their wanderings liave 
cherished their rancor, and should at last have 
executed vengeance through their own tribe, 
in itself testifies sutlicient ly that they had been 
used by Major Waldron to allure the other In- 
dians into the treaty under promises of protec- 
tion, and felt the course which they pursued to 
be a necessary vindication of their honor as 
well as a gratiiication of their passions. 

They were not, however, in any situation to 
pay their debt at once, and on being set at 
l.Lerty they withdrew to their hunting-grounds, 
and as season after season rolltd away had 
apparently forgotten all about it. A grandson 
of old Passaconaway at last ruled them — Kan- 
camagus, sometimes called John Hagkins. He 
was a chief of different spirit from the previous 
. sachems, and the injuries his people had re- 
ceived from the English rankled in his remem- 
brance ; his thinned and suffering tribe, his 
stolen lands, his old wrongs, were perpetual 
stings ; and when finally the English, dispatch- 
ing emissaries to the Mohawks, engaged their 
co-operation against the Eastern Indians, no- 
thing but impotence restrained his wrath. It 
is possible that even then, by reason of his dis- 
tresses, he might have been appeased, if the 
English could ever have been brought to con- 
sider that the Indian's nature was li'inian 
nature, and to treat him with anything but 



violence when he was strong and contempt 
when he was weak. Several letters which 
Kancaniagus sent to the Governor of New 
Hampshire, and which are curiosities, are ad- 
duced to prove his amenable disposition at ihis 
time: 

" Mat 15th, 1685. .. 

" Honor Governor my friend You my friend. ' 
I desire your worsliip and your power, because 
I hope you can do some great mutters — this 
one, I am poor and naked and I have no men 
at my place because I afraid allways Moliogs he 
will kill me every day and night. If your wor- 
ship when please pray help me you no let 
Mohogs kill me at my place at Malamake 
Rever called Panukkog and Natukkog, I will 
submit your worsiup and your power. — And 
now I want pouder and such alminishun, shatt 
and guns, because I have forth at my home and 
I plant theare. 

" This all Indian hand, but pray you do con- 
sider your humble servant, Joun Hagkins." 

This le|fer was written for Kancamagus by an 
Indian teacher, who signed it, together with 
King Hary, Old Robin, Mr. Jorge Rodunno- 
nukgus, and some dozen others, bv making their 
respective marks. The next letter is a much 
more complicated affair In style ; it is dated on 
the same day. 

" Honor Mr. Governor : 

" Now this day I com your house, I want se 
you, and I bring my hand at before you I want 
shake hand to you if your worship when please 
then you receive my hand then shake your 
hand and my hand. You my friend because I 
remember at old time when live my grant 
father and grant mother then Englishmen com 
this country, then my grant father and English- 
men tiiey make a good govenant, they friend 
allwayes, my grant father leving at place called 
Malamake Rever, other name chef Natukkog 
and Panukkog, that one revt-r great many 
names, and I bring you this few skins at this 
first time I will give you my friend. This all 
Indian hand. Johx Hawkins, Sagamore." 

These letters winning no notice from the 
contemptuous official, on the same day were 
followed by another : 

" Please your Worship — I will intreat you 
matther, you my friend now ; this, if my Indian 
he do you long, pray you no put your law, be- 
cause som my Indians fooll, some men much 
love drunk then he no know what lie do, maybe 
he do mischif when he drunk, if so pray you 
must let me know what he done because I will 
ponis him what have done, you, you my friend, 
if you desire my business then sent me I will 
help you if I can. Mr. John Hogkins." 

None of these letters having produced any 
effect, the sachem abandoned the one-sided cor- 
respondence, and on the next morning indited 
another epistle to Mr. Mason, the claimant of 
the Province. 

"Mr. Mason— Pray I want speake you a few 
words if j'our worship when please, because I 
com parfas. I will speake this governor but 
he go away so he say at last night, and so far 
I understand this governor his power that your 
power now, so he speak his own mouth. Pray 11 
you take what I want pray come to me because 
I want go hom at this day. 

"Your humble servant, 

Joun Hagiuxs, Indian Sogmon." 



42 



DGVEK. 



There was something touching in these let- 
ters, to any but an early settler ; but appa- 
rently they were quite disregarded, and Kan- 
camagus had every right to feel ill-used by 
the neglect which his petition for protection 
from the Mohawks met, and it is probable that 
this waiting at rich men's gates only deepened 
the old grudge. At the close of the summer 
various affronts were put upon the settlers at 
Saco, and their dogs were killed ; after which 
the Indians gathered theii own corn and re- 
moved tlieir families to some unknown place. 
This resembling a warlike menace, messengers 
were sent, to discover its meaning, who were 
informed that the Peunacooks had received 
tlireats from the Mohawks, and had withdrawn 
from the settlements that the English might 
not suffer on their account — far too plausible a 
reply and too magnanimous action for the 
truth. But an agreement of friendship was 
then made, and was signed, among the rest, 
by Kancamagiis and another chief named 
Mesandouit. 

Kancamagus had no intention of making this 
anything but a brief truce, and he improved 
the time to gather around himself the little 
band of the sullen Pennacooks, and to strike 
hands with the Peqiiawkets, and the rem- 
nant of the more northerly tribes, while several 
of the Strange Jndiuns, who were among the 
four hundred prisoners of that 6th of Sep- 
tember, escaped from their slavery, returned 
to New England, found their way to the haunts 
of the Pennacooks and Ossipees. and with the 
recital of their sufferings assisted liim la fan- 
ning the steadily smoldering tires of hate to a 
fnry against their betrayer on that unforgotten 
day. 

Nor had Major Waldron endeavored at all to 
pacify the Indians, in the meantime. His 
prominent position alone would have keiit his 
great misdeed tresh in their remembrance, 
even without his accustomed hot-headed en- 
ergy of action. No little act of his that could 
embitter one savage remained untold by an- 
other; they fancied deceit in all his dealings 
now, and used to tell tliat in buying their peltry 
he would say his own hand weighed a pound, 
and would lay it on the other scale. He had 
bpen in command, too, on a frontier expedition, 
where, a conference being held with arms laid 
aside, Waldron, suspecting foul play, seized 
the point of a lance which he espied hid be- 
neath a board, and, drawing it forth, advanced 
brandishing it toward the other party, who 
had probably concealed it there to be used 
only in case of a second act of treachery on 
Lis own part, and the conference broke up in 
a skirmish, in which several of the Indians, 
including- a powerful chieftain, were killed, a 
canoe-luU drowned, and five were captured, 
together with a thousand pounds of dried beef 
— and another mark was made on the great 
score which at some time the Indians meant to 
cross out. 

Sir Edmund Andros was the Governor of 
New England now, and in the spring of 1688, 
fired with ambitious projects or with cupidity, 
he sailed down the coast in a man-of-war, and 
failing to achieve any other doughty action, 
plundered, in the absence of its master, the 
house of the Baron df St. Castine, a French 
oflicer, who had married the daughter of the 
great Tarratlne chief, Modokawando. Castine, 
buruiug with indignation, immediately used all 



his influence, and It was great, to excite the 
Indians to avenge the injury and Insult ; and 
from unheeded complaints that their fisheries 
were obstructed, their corn devoured by cattle, 
their lands patented without consent, and their 
trading accounts tampered with, they pro- 
ceeded to reprisal, and the old ditficulties 
broke out afresh. They were all at an end, 
however, before the next summer. The cropa 
were in. the Indians went peaceably to and fro 
through the settlements, their wrongs seemed 
to be righted, their wounds to be healed ; thir- 
teen years had elapsed since the capture of 
the four hundred, the settlers no longer re- 
membered it, the Indians themselves never 
made allusion to it ; Waldron, now nearly 
eighty years old, but full of vigor, relied 
securely on his power over the savages, his 
acquaintance with their character, and his 
long-acknowledged superiority ; the village, 
with its five gariison-houses, into which the 
neighboring families withdrew at night, but 
kept no watch, feeling safe behind the bolted 
gates of the great timber walls, reposeil in an 
atmosphere of tranquillity and contentment, 
and no one suspected any guile. 

It was while affairs were in this comfort- 
able condition that, on t; e 27th of June, 1689, 
the Indians were observed rambling through 
the town, on one errand and another, in 
far more frequent numbers than usual or than 
seemed necessary for trade. Many strange 
(aces were among them ; and it was noticed 
that their sidelong glances scrutinized the ae- 
fenses very closely. To more than one house- 
wife a kindly squaw muttered hints of mischief, 
but so darkly as to give only a vague sense of 
danger. As night drew near, one or two of 
the people, a little alarmed, whispered to 
Major Waldron a fear that evil was in the air. 
Waldron laughed at them, told them to go and 
plant their pumpkins, and he would let them 
know when the Indians were going to break 
out ; and being warned again at a later hour 
by a young man, who assured him tliere was 
great uneasiness in the settlement, he said he 
knew the Indians perfectly, and there was not 
the least occasion for concern. That night 
the sacliem, Mesandouit, was hospitaljly enter- 
tained at Waldron's table. " Brotner Waldron," 
said he, " what would you do it tlie Strange 
Indians were to come now ?" and Waldron 
carelessly answered that he could assemble a 
hundred men by the lifting of his linger. It is 
not said whetlier Mesandouit remained in the 
garrison-house or not ; but on the same even- 
ing a couple of squaws requested a night's 
lodging on the hearth, telling the Major that 
a company of Indians were encamped a few 
miles off, who were coming to trade their 
beaver on the next day. Several of tlie house- 
hold objected to the society of the squaws that 
night, but it being dull weather, Waldron com- 
passionately said, '• Let the poor creaturea 
lodge by the fire ;" and by-and-by, in total un- 
suspicion, setting no watch, and thinking no 
harm, the family retired to bed, while at three 
of the remaining garrison-houses other squaws 
had obtained entrance and shelter on a similar 
pretense. 

Five days before. Major Hinchman, of Chelms- 
ford, having heard from two friendly Indians 
a strange story of hostile intentions against 
Cocheco, had dispatched an urgent letter to 
the Governor acquainting him witli the rumor. 



DOYEE. 



33 



At the same time, he ■wrote to Mr. Danforth of 
the Council, and Mr. Danforth instantly for- 
warded the letter, and begged the Governor to 
lose no time, but to send to Cocheco *' on pur- 
pose rather than not at all ;" yet for some 
unexplained reason — whether the Governor re- 
garded the rumor as idle, or could do nothing 
tin his Council could be gathered — although 
Major Hinchman's letter was dated on the 22l1 
of June — it was not till the 27th that any 
attempt was made to apprise Waldron of his 
danger. 

"BosTOX, 27th June, 1G89. 
"Honorable Sir — The Governor and Council 
having this day received a letter from Major 
Ilinchman, of Chelmsford, that some Indians 
are come into them, who report that there is a 
gathering of Indians in or about Pennacook, 



with design of mischief to the English. Among 
the said Indians oue Hawiiins is said to be a 
principal designer, and that they have a par- 
ticular design against yourself and Mr. Peter 
Coffin, which the Council thought it necessary 
presently to dispatch a<lvlce thereof, to give 
you notice, that you take care of your own safe- 
guard, they intending to endeavor to betray 
you on a pretension of trade. 

"Please forthwith to signify the imnort hereof 
to Mr. Coffin and others, as you shall think ne- 
cessary, and advise of what information you 
may at any time receive of the Indians' inotions. 
" By order in Council, 

"IsA AnDiNCrTCN, Sec'y. 
"To Major Richard Waldron and Mr. Peter 

Coffin, or either of them, at Cocheco ; these 

with all possible speed." 




' THE INPIANS STOLE OFF IN THE MORNING AND lEFT THT! LITTLR GRANBDAFGFTER OP MAJOR WALDRON 
COVtKED BT THE SNOW, AlONE IN TUE WOODS WITH THE WILD BEASTS AND HUNGER." 



34 



DOVER. 



The speed, however, came too late. When 
Mr. Weare, the bearer of this agitated and ill- 
written letter, on the night of its date reached 
Newbnry, a freshet had swollen the stream so 
that it was impassable ; and while he was r d- 
Ing up .mJ down the bank the squaws had been 
admitted into the garrison-houses and had 
stretched themselves before the fires. These 
squaws had asked in an incidental way to be 
told how to go out if they should wish to leave 
the place after the others were asleep, and had 
willingly been shown the way; and accordingly 
in the dead of the night, noiselessly as he com- 
ing of darkness itself, the bolts were withdrawn 
by them, and a low whistle crept out into the 
thickets and the ambush of the river-banks, 
and sounding their dreadful war-whoop in re- 
ply, the Indians leaped within the gaues. The 
squaws, who had faithfully informed themselves, 
hurriedly signified the number of people in each 
apartment, and the invaders divided in every 
direction, and missed none of those they sought. 
Waldron himself lodged in an inner room, and, 
wakened by the noise, he leaped out of bed 
crying, " What now ! what now !" and, seizing 
only his sword, met the Indians, and, old as he 
was, with his white wrath blazing loftily over 
the fierce devils, he drove them before him' 
from door to dour till he had passed the third. 
As he sprung back then for other weapons, the 
Indians rushed up behind him and stunned him 
with their hatchets, felled him, and dragged 
him to the hall, where they seated him in an 
armchair placed on the top of a table, and, 
tauntingly asking him, "Who shall judge In- 
dians now ?" left him to recover his senses 
while they compelled such of the family as they 
had spared to prepare them some food. Their 
hunger being appeased, they returned to Major 
Waldron, had his books, in which their trade 
had been registered, brought forth, and as each 
Indian's turn came, he stepped up, crying, " I 
cross out my account !" and with his knife drew 
a deep gash across the breast of the old hero. 
Tradition adds that, cutting off the hand whose 
weight they had so often felt, they tossed it into 
the scales to discover for themselves if indeed 
It weighed a pound, and were struck with con- 
sternation on finding that it did. It is not re- 
corded that Waldron uttered a cry of pain or 
an entreaty for their mercy. " Oli, Lord !" he 
said, " oh. Lord !" and, si)ent with anguish and 
loss of blood from the shocking mutilation to 
which he was further subjected, he fell forward 
on his sword, which one of the tormentors held 
ready to receive him, and the vengeance that 
had brooded and waited thirteen years was sat- 
isfied. 

That night Mrs. Elizabeth Heard, coming up 
the river with her sons, from Strawberry Bank, 
was a'armed by the turmoil and the light, and 
sought protection at Waldron's garrison ; but, 
discovering the terrible state of things there, 
Mrs Heard was so prostrated that she had no 
power to fly, and her chiMren were obliged to 
leave her— though It would seem as if the three 
sons might, at least, have dragged her into the 
shelter of the bushes, where afterward she 
contrived to crawl. With the daylight an In- 
dian got a glimpse of her. and hastened to part 
the bushes, pistol In hand, but, looking at her 
an instant, turned about and left her ; he had 
taken only a stride away when, as if a doubt 
crossed his mind, he came back, gave her an- 
other glance, and with a yell departed. It was 



probably the Indian whom she had protected 
on the day of which this day was the result. 
Mrs. Heard's own garrison had been saved by 
the barking of a dog, which wakening William 
Wentworth — the ancestor of all the Went- 
worths in this country — he pushed the door to, 
and, throwing himself on his back, held it with 
his feet till assistance came, various bullets 
piercing the oak meanwhile, but missing its 
valiant and determined old defender. But in 
two other garrisons the Indians had worked 
their bloody will ; and, having been refused en- 
trance into that of Mr. Ootlin's son, they 
brought out the father, captured at an earlier 
houi", and threatened the old man's murder 
before the son's eyes, upon which he also sur- 
rendered ; but while the house was being 
plundered, all the Coffins escaped together. 
After this, setting fire to the mills and house-, 
the Indians, having killed twenty-two persons 
and made prisoners of twenty-nine, retreated 
by the light of the blaze, so rapidly as to be be- 
yond danger before any of the other settlers 
were aroused to a sense of what had been 
done. 

But in their flight the Indians inaugurated a 
system that for years continued to plague the 
settlers — alleviate, though it did, the previous 
horrors of Indian warfare — and, sparing the 
lives of their prisoners, they sold them to the 
French. Among the captives of that night was 
a little granddaughter of Major Waldron's, 
who, having been sent by the Indians, while at 
their dark work in the garrison-house, to bid 
forth those hiding In another room, had crept 
into a bea and drawn the clothes about her ; 
slie had been found again, though, and had 
been forced to undertake the march with them, 
half-clad and on her little bare feet. She was 
only seven years old, and her trials were 
bitter. 

At one time her master made her stand 
against a tree while he charged his gun and 
took aim at her ; again, an Indian girl pushed 
her off a precipice into the river, and, having 
clambered out, she dared not tell, when ques- 
tioned, the reason of her being so wet ; once 
the Indians stole off in the morning and left 
her, covered by the snow, alone in the woods 
with the wild beasts and hunger, and, tracing 
them by their foot-prints, the poor little thing 
went crying after them through the wilder- 
ness ; and at another time, building a great fire, 
they told her she was to be ro: sted, whereupon 
bursting into tears she ran and threw her arms 
round her master's neck, begging him to save 
her, which, on the condition that she would 
behave well, he promised her to do. Another 
capture of more subsequent importance was 
the wife of Richard Otis, the ancestress of Hon. 
John Wentworth, of Illinois, and of Mr. Charles 
Tuttle, late of the Cambridge Observatory. 
The unhappy Mrs. Otis had seen her husband 
killed as he rose in bed, a son share his father's 
fate, a daughter's brains beaten out against the 
stairs, and with her little daughter Judith, who 
was subsequently rescued, and her baby of 
three months old, she was led up through the 
White Mountain Notch to Canada. This infant 
of three months became a personage of great 
interest in her day. Baptized by the French 
priests and given the name of Christina, and 
intended by them for conventual life, on reach- 
ing maturity she declined taking the vail, 
and wu"- married to a Frenchman by the 



DOVEE. 



35 



name of Le Beau. Upon her husband's death 
an inextinguishable desire to see her native 
land tdoli control of her, and not being permitted 
to carry her children with her, she left them in 
the hands of riends, upon the liberation of 
prisoners, and at the loss of all her estate, 
which was not inconsiderable, as she herself 
says, journeyed back to Dover. A few years 
afterward she returned to Canada, wiiere she 
appears to have been greatly valued, made an 
unsuccessful effort, to recover her children, and 
again underwent the hardships of the perilous 
pilgrimage home. She must have been a wo- 
man of rather remarkable nature to prefer the 
New England wilds with their discomforts to 
the comparatively sumptuous life of the French 
in Canada ; but she was still young, and whether 
from pure preference, or because rl.e formed 
another attachment tliere at an early date, she 
remained in New England and married the ad- 
venturous Captain Ttiomas Baker, who had 
himself been a captive of the Indians some 
years previously, and who had accompanied 
her on the voyage home ; and, abjuring the re- 
ligion of her baptism, she embraced the Pro- 
testant faith. Her apostasy appeared greatly 
to distress the priest whose especial charge she 
had been, and more than a dozen years after 
her return led to quite a controversial tilt be- 
tween representatives of the two forms of be- 
lief-Father Reguenot addressing her a long 
and affectionate letter, in which he made lier 
and her husband handsome promises if tliey 
would go to Montreal, wrought upon her feel- 
ings in describinsr the deatli of her daughter, 
set forth quite ably the distinctive doctrines 
of his Church and besought her to return 
to it: 

'' Let us add, dear Christine," said he, " that 
the strange land in which yon are does not af- 
ford you the Paschal Lamb, tlie true and 
heavenly manna, the bread of angels ; I mean 
Jesus Christ contained really within the holy 



Eucharist, which is only to be found In the 
Catholic Cluirch ; so that you are in that place, 
like the prodigal son, reduced to feed on im- 
proper and insipid food, which cannot give you 
life, after having led here on the most exqui- 
site, most savory, and most delicious food of 
Heaven — I mean the adorable oody and precious 
blood of Jesus Christ, at the holy sacrament of the 
altar." By this letter, written in a crabbed and 
almost illegible hand, but in the language of 
her childhood and of countless dear associa- 
tions, Christine' seems to have been unshaken, 
and Governor Burnett made a learned and 
masterly reply to it, among other things de- 
claring, in reference to the passage quoted, 
tliat the upiiolders of this intprpretation of the 
Eucharist did, in St. Paul's words, " crucify to 
themselves the Sou of God afre*h and init him 
to an open 6,hame." These letters attracted 
much attention througliout the Colonies, and 
rendered Christine a person of importance dur- 
ing all her life of nearly ninety years, and she 
received many favors and several grants of 
land, one of five hundred acres under vhe 
guardianship of Colonel William Pepperrell. 

But though the greater part of that long 
term of life was jiassed in Dover, it was un- 
troubled by any foray of the Indians wlio once 
had desolated her friends' and father's dwell- 
ings. For, having glutted their vengeance, the 
Pennacooks were content to pay the penalty, 
to fly from ti eir old hunting-grounds, to aban- 
don their territory and their name, to find re- 
fuge in Canada and lose themselves among 
the Indians of the St. Francis , and, except 
when some solitary wanderer roamed alone by 
the graves of his fathers, the Pennacooks never 
again were seen on tlie pleasant bank of the 
" winding water " And no one who surveys 
the busy, bustling town of Dover co-day, would 
think that less than two hundred years ago it 
was the scene of such a tragedy a.* Waldron's 
Massacre. 



PORTSMOUTH. 



An honr aftor leaving Ncvburyport, haritiG; 
crossed th? Merrimack, no longeron tlie brid<re 
that Blondin refusert to walk, tiie traveler is in 
Portsmouth, a town which, without possessinff 
the vitality of Newburyport or the world-known 
traditions of Salem, is In some regards as inter- 
esting as either. Few spots in the whole 
country can boast the primeval grandeur of 
which it was the possessor, and traces of 
which are still to be found both in place and 
people. Being the only seaport of an inde- 
pendent State — for, before our present confed- 
eration, New Hampshire was a little Republic, 
governed by a President and two Houses of Con- 
gress — much home wealth naturally centred 
there, much foreign wealth and many dignitaries 
were drawn there ; and being a provincial cap- 
ital, for so long a time the home of Presidents 
and Governors, and afterward a garrisoned and 
uaval place of the United States, its society has 
always been of the choicest description, and its 
homes and habits sumptuous. The greater part 
of the old families have died out or have left 
the place, but many of their dwellings remain 
to tell. of the degree of splendor which charac- 
terized not only their hospitality, but their 
common life. 

The town lies very prettily upon land between 
several creeks, just where the Piscataqua 
widens— to meet the sea three miles below — 
into a harbor of extraordinary but placid pictur- 
esqueness. Martin Pring was its first visitor, 
and after him John Smith, and it was originally 
part of the Mason and Gorges grant, although 
Mason bought out Sir Ferdinando's interest, 
built a great house, and established the settle- 
ment here himself, sending from Dover an ex- 
plor.ng party tQ the White Mountains, or Crystal 
Hills, as they were then callerl, in the hope of 
adding diamond uJues to his possessions. In 
the first days the central part of the town was 
known as Strawberry Bank, and so many an 
aged resident still speaks of it ; and by a singu- 
lar circumstance it happens that nearly all this 
portion of Portsmouth, containing public build- 
ings, banks, otlices, stores and dwellings, is 
owned in fee by the old North Church, being 
some twelve acres in the centre of the city, to- 
gether with tlilrty-eight acres through which 
runs the Islington Road, all of it constituting 
glebe land leased to the present holders for 



nine hundred and ninety-nine years, and at the 
expiration of that little term to fall back wi.h 
all its improvements into the hands of the 
Church, if the Church be still in existence — a 
prospective wealth bearing favorable compari- 
son with the present wealth of Trinity Church 
in New York. 

The place still does a very fair business for 
one of its size, Portsmouth lawns and hosiery be- 
ing known the country over, and its principal 
rone-walk furnishing nearly all the rjgging oi 
the Maine and Massachusetts marine. Many of 
the well-shaded streets are paved, and there 
are library and athenseum, fine schools and 
churches ; among the latter, St. John's, suc- 
ceeding that to which Caroline, the Queen of 
George the Second, gave altar and pulpit books, 
communion service, chancel furniture and a 
silver christening-basin — a stately and interest- 
ing edifice, with its mural tablets and the 
porphyry font taken at the capture of an African 
city. 

Although Portsmouth probably shared the 
prevailing sentiment of New England to some 
extent, she was never thoroughly Puritan, 
having been planted more for mercantile than 
religious ends, and she is still a young settle- 
ment when we read of the profane game of 
shovel-hoard being openly played there, and 
the character of its banquetiuir and merrymak- 
ing has a: all times more of the Cavalier than 
the Roundhead. In 1711 she built an almshouse 
at an expense of nearly four thousand pounds, 
a thing contrary to the genius of all Puritanism; 
and to the honor of Portsmouth be it known 
that this was not only the first almshouse in 
this country, but in the whole civilized world. 
It was in Portsmouth, too, that there was made 
perhaps the earliest attack on African slavery, 
by a decision of the local court that it was a 
thing not to be tolerated, although, having 
eased their consciences by the declaration and 
the law — a famous habit not confined to Ports- 
mouth — the good people went on keeping such 
property in slaves as they chose. 

The rank of the early population there was of 
a much higher social type than could be found 
in other settlements. There were the Parkers, 
the gravestone of whose ancestress was re- 
cently uncovered. Lady Zerviah Stanley, who 
made a love-match and escaped to this country 



POETSMOUTH. 



37 



from the wrath of h^r father, the Earl of Derby. 
There are the Cnaunceys, itnmigrauts here 
through the persecuLions of Archbishop Laud, 
sprung of Chauncey de Chauacey,from Ohauucey 
near Amiens in France, who entered England 
with the Conqueror ; theii- head in this country 
could trace his noble descent back to Charle- 
magne, and back to Egbert in the year 800, 
lineage not excelled by Queen Victoria's own. 
There were the families of Pepperrell and Went- 



worth, baroneted for illustrious deeds ; and 
there are to be found the first mention of the 
old naoies of Langdon, Frost, New march, Gush- 
ing, She.fe, Penhallow, names which revive 
the traditions of a magnilicent hospitality. 
Here was born Tobias Lear, the friend and 
secretary of Washington, and his house re- 
mains to-day full of mementoes of Lis chief; 
there lived John Langdon, first President of the 
United States fcienate ; the handsome face of 




'SHE HUNG OUT MANT A SIGNAL FROM HEB WINDOW FOR THE onVERNOR TO BEAD ACROSS THE OFEH 
SPACE BETWEEN THEIB DWELLINGS." 



38 



POETSMCUTH. 



Madame Scott, the widow of John Hancoclr, has 
many a lime looked out of that window ; there 
stands the house in which successively lived 
Jeremiah Mason and Daniel Webster ; tliere the 
handsome dwelling of Levi Woodbury, and 
there were born the Blunts, whose cliarts to- 
day define the courses of all modern com- 
merce. 

Many other mansions of note are still stand- 
ing. Here on the corner of Daniel and Chapel 
rtreets, with its gamhrel-roof and lutliern- 
iights, is the old Warner House, the first brick 
house of the place, and whose material was 
brought from Holland ; there are still p; escrved 
in it the gigantic pair of elk-horns presented to 
the head of the house by the Indians with whom 
he traded, and who, out of their skillfully- 
painted portraits, still look down at the guest 
who mounts the staircase ; there are paintings 
by Copley hanging in another place within, and 
on repapering its hall, a few years since, four 
coatings of paper being removed, a full-length 
likeness of Governor Phipps on his charger m as 
discovered, together with ot ler life-sized fres- 
coes, of more or less value, of whose existence 
people of eighty years had n( ver heard ; this 
house ought to be as secure from the fires of 
Heaven as a person vaccinated by Jenncr otiglit 
to be from disease, for it has a lightning-rod 
put up under Dr. Franklin's personal inspec- 
tion, and the first one used in tie State. Fire 
has destr yed the spacious house where, a hun- 
dred years ago, in the midst of gue-ts assem- 
bled with all the illumination and cheer of the 
times, the beautiful Miss Sheaie sat in her 
bridal-dress waiting for the bridegroom who 
never came, but wlio left his great wealth, his 
love, and liis good name, left his bride to lier 
destiny of alternating doubt and terror, and 
disappeared out of the world for ever. Tliis 
same fiie, or another, has left no mark of the 
house to which High Sheriff Parker once hur- 
ried so hungrily with Ruth Blay's blood upon 
his hands— a young girl condemned for murder- 
ing her child, tliongh afterward f-und to be in- 
nocent, and her reprieve sent forward to arrive 
only two minutes too late, for she had been 
driven to the scaffold, clothed in silk and filling 
the air with her cries, and hurried out of life 
before the apjicinted hour becatise the sheriff 
feared lest his dinner should cool by waiting. 
But there still stands the old "Earl of Halifax'" 
inn, shabby enougli now, but once a place of 
Tory revelry and FtCbel riot ; a house that has 
had famous guests in its day, for, not to men- 
tion the platitude of Washington's and Lafay- 
ette's entertainment, here John Hancock had 
his headquaiters, with Elbridge Gerry, Eut- 
ledge. and General Knox ; here General Sul'i- 
van. President of Nesv Hampshire, convened 
his council ; and here, something later, Louis 
Philippe and his two brotheus of Orl aus were 
cnred for. On an island in the harbor, whence 
is seen the wide view of lort and field and light- 
Louse, and the sea stretching away till the Isles 
of Shoals and Agamenticas lie in the horizon 
like clouds, stands the old Prescott mansion, 
where the Legislature was wont to be enter- 
tained, but whose wide-doored liospitality has 
given place to that of the State, since it is now 
another almshouse. . In Kittery, a sort of sub- 
urb of Portsmouth, the garrison-house, two 
hundred years old, is still shown, and Sir Wil- 
liam Pepperrell's residence by the water, with 
its once deer-stocked park and avenues of 



mighty elms ; and, on the other side of the 
river, in Little Harbor, two miles from the 
business centre, the old house erected by Gov- 
ernor Benning Wentworth, but now passed out 
of the liands of his family, remains to delight 
the antiquary. This house, built around three 
sides of a square, though only two stories in 
height, contains fifty-two rooms, and looks like 
an agglomeration of buildings of various dates 
and styles ; in its cellars a troop of horse could 
be accommodated in time of danger, and here 
are still kept in order the council-chamber and 
the billiard-room, with the spinet and buffet 
and gun-rack of their time, and the lialls, fin- 
ished in oak and exquisitely carved with the 
year's work of a chisel, are lined with ancient 
portraits. Here lived and kept a famous table 
the old Governor Benning Wentworth, as head- 
strong and self-willed and passionate as any 
Wentworth of them all. It is told of him that, 
when long past his sixtieth year, he lost what 
was left of his heart to pretty Patty HDton, his 
maid-servant; and, ai^semblmg a great dinner- 
party ror.nd his bo rd, with the Rev. Arthur 
Brown, whe.i the walnuts and the wine were 
on, he rung for Patty, who came and stood 
blushingly beside him, and then, as Governor 
of New Hampshire, he comnsanded the clergy- 
man, who had hesitated at his request as a pri- 
vate gentleman, to marry him ; and Patty 
straightway became Lady Wentworth, in the 
parlance of the day, and carried things with a 
high hand -ever aiterward, until, the old Gov- 
ernor dying, she married Colonel Michael Went- 
worth, who ran through the property and then 
kdled himself, leaving the legacy of his last 
words: ''I have had my cake, and ate it." 

The^e Wentworlhs were a powerful and hot- 
blooded race— nothing but the ri£,or of the law 
ever stood between them and a purpose ; their 
talent made New Hampshire a power, and for 
sixty years they furnished her with Governors. 
On Pleasant street, at the head of Washington, 
is still to be found the house of Governor John 
Wentworth, a successor of Benning ; old as it 
if, the piush upon its walls is as fiesh as newly- 
pressed velvet, and valuable portraits of the 
Governors and their kin a feAv years since still 
hung upon them. Into this house, with its 
pleae^ant garden running down to the river, 
once came a bride under circumstances that 
the customs of to-day would cause us to con- 
sider peculiar. It was Frances Detring, the 
pet and darling of old Sam Wentwtrih of 
Boston, and for whom the pretty villages of 
Francestown and Deering were named. When 
very young, she was in love with her cousin 
John, who, on leaving Harvard, went to Eng- 
land, no positive pledge of marriage passing 
between them ; as he delayed there some years, 
before his return she had nuirried another 
cousin, Theodore Atkinson by name. Some 
years subsequently to their marriiige, and after 
a lingering illness, Theodore died. But John 
had, in the meantime, returned, clothed with 
honor and with tha regalia of Governor, and, 
finding his cousin a woman of far lovelier ap- 
pearance than even her lovely youth had pro- 
mised, had not hesitated to pay her hi-- devoirs, 
which, the gossips said, she had not hesitated 
to accept, hanging out many a signal from her 
window lor tlie Governor to read across the 
open space between their dwellings. On one 
day Theodore breathed his last. His burial 
took place on the following Wednesday ; by 



POUTSMOUTH. 



89 



the Governor's order all the bells in town were 
tolled, flags were hung at half-mast, and minute- 
guns were fired Irom the fort and from the 
ships-of-war in the harbor. On Sunday the 
weeping widow, clad in crapes, listened in 
church to the funeral eulogies ; on Monday 
her affliction was mitigated ; on Tuesday all 
the fingers of all the seamstresses of the country 
roundabout were flying ; and on the next Sun- 
day, in the white satins and jewels and far- 
dingales of a bride, she walked up the aisle the 
wife of Governor Wentworth. When the Revo- 
lution came, the Governor, a Tory, had to fly ; 
but his wife's beauty won favor at the Court, 
she was appointed a lady-in-waiting there, and 
her husband was rewarded for his loyalty to 
the Crown by the governorship of Nova Scotia, 
where he held his state till death humbled it. 

Portsmouth, it may be seen, abounds in such 
traditions as these of the Wentwoiths. Of 
another sort is the story of Captain Samuel 
Cutts. He had sent out his vessel to the Span- 
ish coasts, and his clerk, young William Ben- 
nett, who had been reared in his counting-room, 
and who, after the old-fashioned way, made 
his master's interests his own, went supercargo ; 
the vessel fell among thieves, but thieves who 
consented to restore their booty upon receipt 
of several thousand dollars, a sum of much less 
value than the vessel and cargo. Captain 
Leigh, of course, had not the money with him, 
nor did it seem practicable tn keep the vessel 
on full expense while a messenger was sent 
home for it ; but upon condition of leaving 
hostages he was suffered to sail away, young 
Bennett and a friend remaining. The terms 
were carefully impressed on Captain Leigh's 
memory : scf many days and it would be time 
for the money — till then the hostages were to 
be well treated ; the money not forthcoming, 
the hostages were to be imprisoned on bread 
and water ; so many days more, and they were 
to be left unfed till they starved to death. Cap- 
tain Leigh, to whom Bennett was dear as a 
son, crowded on all sail lor home, arrived, 
told his story, and, on sacred promise that the 
money should instantly be paid, delivered the 
ship that still belonged to her captors into the 
hands of Captain Samuel Cutts, and waited 
breathlessly for the promise to be kept. Mean- 
while the friend of Bennett had escaped, Ben- 
nett himself triisting so in his master's faith 
that he refused to go. Captain Leigh waited 
silently a while, but, seeing no prospect of the 
ransom's being paid, he began to urge the 
matter— precious time was passing; then Ben- 
nett's parents urged, and were assured that 
the money had been sent. But when, if the 
money had been sent, it was time for Bennett's 
return and yet he did not come, anxiety 
mounted again to fever-heat ; there were agon- 
ized prayers offered in church by the parents, 
and Captain Leigh heard them ringing in his 
ears ; he could think of nothing else ; he knew 
the gradations of the cruel days apportioned 
to Bennett : on such a day he went into soli- 
tary confinement ; on sucli a day he was de- 
prived of food ; on such a day he must have 
ceased to live. When that day came, Bennett 
had truly undergone all his sentence aod was 
dead, and Captain Leigh was mad. 

But all the traditions of splendor are not 
confined to the gentility of Portsmouth. A 
colored man, steward of a ship sailing from the 
Piscataqua, went into loftier society than many 



of his betters ever saw. He was in a Russian 
port, during a review held by the Emperor in 
person, and went on shore, only to attract as 
much attention as the Emperor himself, for a 
black skin was rarer than black diamonds 
there. The next day officials came on board 
the ship, to learn if the black man's services 
could be had for the imperial family, and the 
fortunate fellow left his smoky caboose, hard 
fare and half-contemptuous companions, to 
become an object of admiration behind an Em- 
peror's chair ; and, being allowed to return to 
Portsmouth for his wife and children, had the 
satisfaction of parading his gold-laced grandeiir 
before the humbler citizens to his heart's con- 
tent. 

It is not only in legends of the elegancies of 
colonial life, however, that Portsmouth is rich. 
She had her valiant part in all the old French 
and Indian wars, and the only ship-of-the-line 
owned by the Continental Government was 
here constructed, on Badger's Island, where a 
hundred ships had been built before. Congress 
having in 1776 ordered her agents to procure, 
among others, three seventy-four-gun ships, 
the America was begun, being the heaviest 
ship that had ever been laid down on the conti- 
nent. Little was done about her, though, till 
nearly three years afterward, when John Paul 
Jones was ordered to command her. Jones 
came to Portsmouth, found the ship only a 
skeleton, and, without material or money and 
in the face of countless obstacles, pushed for- 
ward her construction, though declaring it the 
most tedious and distasteful service he was 
ever charged with. As soon as the British 
heard of the progress the ship w;;s making, 
they devised a thousand plans to destroy l.er, 
intelligence of which was constantly furnished 
to Jones, in cipher ; and at last, on an alarm 
sent by General Washington him^^elf, failing to 
obtain a guard from New Hampshire, he f re- 
vailed upon the carpenters to keep watch by 
night, and paid them irom his own purse ; and 
they were otherwise rewarded by the sight of 
large whaleboats stealing into the river on 
muffled oars, and creeping, with their armed 
companies, up and down by the J?»^9'U'a, without 
daring to board her. At the birlh of the 
French Dauphin, Jones mounted artillery in 
the ship, decorated her with the flags of all na- 
tions, fired salutes, gave a great entertainment 
on board, and alter dark illuminated her from 
truck to keelson, kept up a jeu <le joie fill mid- 
night, and on the anniversary of Independence 
repeated his rejoicings. The Amtrica was su- 
perbly built — both siern and bows made so 
strong that the men might always be under 
cover. Her sculpture, also, is said to have 
been of a noble order : America, at the head, 
crowned with laurels, one arm raised to heaven, 
and the other supporting a buckler with thirteen 
silver stars on a blue ground, while the rest 
of the person was enveloped in the smoke of 
war. Other large figures in relief were at the 
stern and elsewhere, representing Tyranny 
and Oppression, Neptune, and Mars, and Wis- 
dom surrounded by the lightnings. Jones, 
however, was destined never to command this 
ship on which he had lavished so much. The 
Magmfique, a seventy-four-gun ship of the 
French, having just been wrecked in Boston 
Harbor, Congress magnanimously presented to 
France theonly ship-of-the-line in the American 
possession, and for the tenth time Jones was 



43 



POBTSMOUTa 



deprived of a command. Nevertheless, he com- 
pleted the ship, and at last launched her ; the 
launching beinjj no easy task in that little bay, 
with the bluff of the opposite shore but a hun- 
dred fathoms distant, and ledges of rock and 
conflicting currents everywhere between. But, 
letting her slide precisely at high water, drop- 
ping the bow anchors and slipping the cable 
fastened to the ground on the island, at a sig- 
nal she was off and afloat in safe water, and 
given over to the late commander of the 



Magniflque. It was not long, though, before 
the British captured her — admiring her struc- 
ture ai.d ornament so much, that they added to 
her carvings the crest of the Prince of Wales, 
and considered her peerless in all their fine 
navy. 

During the last war with England she did 
service against her builders, and is still afloat, a 
fifty-gun ship of the Queen's, "an honor," says 
Mr. Brewster in his Eambles, "to Piscataqua 
shipwrights and to our coast oak." 



Price 50 Cents. 





New-England Legends. 



BY 



HARRIET PRESCOTT SPOFFORD. 



WITH ILLUSTRATIONS. 






BOSTON: 

JAMES E. OSGOOD AISTD COMPAJ^Y, 

Late Tick nor & Fields, and Fields, Osgood, & Co. 

1871. 



CHAHIiXSS nEABS'S 

GREAT STORY, 

A TERRIBLE TEMPTATION. 



The continuation of this fascinating story from week to week 
will be found in Every Saturday, the proprietors of this journal 
having paid a high price to the author for the advance sheets 
of his novel. 

The possession of these enables the publishers of Every 
Saturday to lay before the American public the only authorized 
edition of the story, with the author's latest revisions and cor- 
rections, and accompanied by the original illustrations, and to 
issue each instalment simultaneously with its publication in 
London, and several weeks in advance of editions published 
without authority. 

Readers who have begun the story in other publications will 
find at any time several weeks' later chapters in the current 
number of 

STTER? SATURDAY. 



" He lias given to the world a series of pictures, which have 
as distinct and original a vitality as any thing added, during 
this generation, to Artverican art or letters."— The Galaxt. 



WORKS OF BRET HARTE. 



THE LUCK OF ROARING CAMP. 

Sisteenth Edition. In one volume 16mo. Price $1.50. 



POEMS BY BRET HARTE. 

TWENTIETB EDITION. 

"Some of Mr. Harte's poems are known to every reader of American newspapers; for there is 
hardly a journal in the country which has not reproduced his quaint hallads. His verses are quoted 
everywhere; and snatches of them frequently illustrate leading articles, and elucidate political dis- 
cussions." — New 'York World. 

One volume I6mo. Fries $1.50. 



THE HEATHEN CHINEE. 

With Eight Pull-page Illustrations by S. Eytinge, Jun. Paper Cover, 25 Cents. 

This world-famous poem has been fitly Illustrated by Mr. Eytinge, who has had the great advantage 
of the author's suggestions. Under his skilful hand, Truthful James, William Nye, and Ah Sin, are 
most effectively as well as authentically portrayed. 



CONDENSED NOVELS. 

Illustrated. Price $1.50. 

A new and enlarged edition of this popular book is nearly ready. It contains, In addition to the 
matter of the previous issues, 

Condensed Novels in the Style of Charles Reade and 

Mr. Disraeli. 

These, like the other parodies, are done with so remarkable skill, that the reader accepts unhesitatingly 
the assertion of " The Hartford Courant," that Mr. Harte's " power of imitation is a sixth sense." This 
volume will be uniform in appearance with his " Luck of Roaring Camp," and " Poems;" and will be 
issued in handsome style on tinted paper, with illustrations by S. EfTiNGE, Jun. 



*#* For sale by all Booksellers. Sent, post-paid, on receipt of price 
by tbe Publishers, 

James R. Osgood & Co., Boston. 



Cijarles lUaHt's Hcli> Story 



IN 



EYEET SATUEDAY. 



4 



By special arrangement with Mr. Charles Reade, his New Serial Novel 

^^A Terrible Temptation/' 

is now appearing in Every Saturday simultaneously wiih its publication in London. It began the 
first of March, and will be continued without interruption in successive numbers of Evert Saturday 
until completed. 

The unquestioned position of Mr. Reade as the most popular of living novelists gives a special interest 
to this announcement. 



PICTORIAL AMERICA 



IN 



EVERY SATURDAY. 



The Conductors of Evert Saturday have begun a series of papers illustrating points of scenic 
and industrial interest in the United States, on a grander scale than has ever been undertaken by any 
pictorial newspaper. The first of the series is entitled " The Taking of Pittsburgh," by Mr. 
Ralpli Keeler, with original desijjns by Mr. Harry Fenn. The narrative, extending through several 
successive numbers of Every Saturday, gives a vivid description by pen and pencil of the route to 
Pittsburgh, of that picturesque city itself, and of the coal and oil regions. Both these gentlemen have 
been on an extended tour of the country which they depict, and the reputation of each in his peculiar 
line is an earnest of the admirable manner in which the work is done. 

The editorial staff employed on Every Saturday embraces many of the ablest writers in the 
country. In its two editorial departments are discussed the leading Political, Social, Literary, and 
Dramatic topics of the day. 

From the New York Evening Post. 

The literary contents of Every SatnrdHy are uniformly rteliphtful, and ehnvr the careful industry and unerring taste of the 
eiitnr. New feature* of inter 'st and attraction are annouced for forthcoming numbers, thougii it m«y admit cf a doubt 
whether the proprietora can make the paper any mjre valuable or brilliant, in letter-press or illustrations, than it is now. 



Terms OF Evert Saturdat —Single Weekly Number, 10 cents; Monthly Parts, 50 cents; 
Yearly Subscription, $5.00 in advance, — $4.00 a year to subscribers for any other Periodical 
issued by 

JAMES R. OSGOOD & CO., Publishers, 

Latb Ticknob & Fields, and Fields, Osgood, & Co. 

124 Treinont Street, Boston. 



ff^^ 



^^o 















. (^x:^c<s 






^^^c^f^^li 






.^^c CO 

-CC c 

GC c CC 

crcc 

CC CC 



^fM 


















ii^C. ^t -^^^s 









-tec ^ 

:tcc^^ 









:^§ 



^c^^ 






zjm 



cm: 



7^ OvC « 









XC^CCl 















^-«l< 






kk: «!Ccc<r 

L «Xc<jC 



ac<r---C cc; __ c<c"<:^^ ' 
_.--<cc <GS:ctc <ac c 

LcC^CIC Cj«c:<3Cc Cj 






^c ^i^c c<:(3nr c ccc 

_ C ■ . v<^ •ej^A 

X ^c4^c«::''Cc(a 

^5^ ^!«L:cclrC'C<: 

jccc ^coa^c. 

CCC o ^ar;.«::c<x 
<cc ccac> <;£vC< 

cc<r c c ^ 



<r.c'<!«r- 



m: m^ 















r 









^ce <^^ ^ 



^ <?: <^^^ r^ 












<3C <I c 









1 Q^c::^h¥:-^ JSQ^' ^c 



ICC. <v 

:: c T^ (c 

CC X 4 

cc- 'i ■ 









^r< 









i^^t mm M 



'ckJCjCC 



«st?<: ciTCic c3c^ . c 



rc ^t: c^ 



-. _- X«dc:trcc ^ 









rr-rccir',-^^^^^3%^;^- 



^ ■■ cc; ccc<3 

S^ car: <ac: 

-■'^ fi <X CCS" c^^cs 

^-'^ ^^'«<- <s^t: 
,- 'CC CC7-CC ^:i^<G 

;;, (CC _ c2SZ<r <^t<rc 
: <:tx •^>c ^rc?t; 
; cg:c <3::v€c or c« 









^ C^J' CC 

- ^^''^ 

c c ^<o ^^. 



CXC^^^X C 









cf ,-^ ^^ ^^ C <c X^ 

%^5> ^ <<^: «vc c r <^e c c 



r «r <j^cr<r.<« 






1^ vC:<C 

'<;*;< <i^c 



,- <: c < 



c^^'«E^ 



ssaHf)N03 JO AHV»an 



